


Turn Off Trouble Like You Turn Off A Light

by blithers



Category: Marvel Avengers Movies Universe, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Accidental Marriage, F/M, Las Vegas, Memory Loss, Road Trips
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-13
Updated: 2013-10-30
Packaged: 2017-11-16 05:13:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 31,152
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/535899
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blithers/pseuds/blithers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Oh, God," he said, and she knew just enough about Captain America to find this a pretty strongly worded statement on the situation.  (Or, Steve and Darcy wake up married in Vegas.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to my wonderful beta, the lovely [51stcenturyfox](http://51stcenturyfox.livejournal.com/)!

Darcy woke with a start, her cheek pressed into a pile of crumpled sheets and a taste like old cotton in her mouth. She immediately regretted the decision. Her stomach was in full revolt, a headache was starting to meander its way methodically through the different quadrants of her brain, and there was a pair of stockinged feet only a couple inches from her head, which... okay, that was weird. One of these things was not like the other.

The socks had subtly tasteful crisscrossing which reeked of expensive men's department stores. They led to a pair of pressed khakis, unzipped at the front with long legs akimbo on the bed next to her torso, which in turn led to a flat and shockingly wide expanse of bare chest, topped off by a slightly pointy nose and a jawline that was probably visible from space.

She gave herself a mental high-five based on the jawline alone.

She was laid out at the opposite end of the bed, her head at his feet. One of his arms was flung over her shin bones, his fingers digging a little into her calf muscle, and his mouth was open as he slept on his back, gaping gently at the ceiling like a fish as he slept. She reached a hand down to pull her blouse together where a draft was raising goosebumps on her chest. Her shirt was unbuttoned down to her bellybutton.

She moved a hand to rub at her forehead, feeling as if she was performing the action underwater, and watched with distant bemusement as her hand drifted toward her face in slow motion. The dim light caught the angles of the diamond ring she wore, sparkling in sharp little bursts like falling stars, and....

She blinked.

What. the. actual. _fuck_.

\---

She had a quiet panic attack, just to get that out of the way, lying still as a board and staring at the ceiling as the room spun gently underneath her. The word _Vegas_ drifted tauntingly through her brain, waving a red flag at the less functional parts of her thought process.

She cautiously raised her head a bit to peer at the man she was sharing the bed with and tried desperately not to thing of him as _her husband_ as she did this.

And oh God, this was pretty much exactly as bad as she was fearing.

Because Darcy was starting to remember a little of what had happened last night, just the outlines of it, and yeah, that was definitely Captain America stretched out next to her, fighter of Nazis, star of World War II propaganda films she'd had to watch in history class, a recently thawed-out person who moonlighted at saving the world from actual aliens from actual other planets and assorted other supervillainy, of whom she had a vague, slippery memory of meeting for the first time last night at a Tony Stark shindig because that was apparently her life now and just _shit_.

She looked at the ring again, and it sparkled cheerful murder at her.

She swallowed, her throat dry and swollen, and allowed herself to close her eyes for one blissfully calm and dark moment before beginning to carefully extricate herself. He mumbled distractedly, smacking his lips together as she dragged her feet slowly out of the band of his arm. She froze, but he didn't wake up, rolling his head to the other side instead, blonde hair falling into his eyes like a child's.

She remembered Tony Stark toasting last night, egging him on with some scientific concoction he'd assured everybody present would _totally_ get Captain America _wasted_ because it was a fucking disgrace that he couldn't get drunk like an honest American, like the rest of them.

She breathed out slowly and finally managed to free her feet, sliding off the bed and trying to keep the mattress from bouncing. The hotel room was grey and dim, with only a thin border of light sneaking in at the edges of the floor-to-ceiling curtain, but what she could see of the place was nice, much nicer than her tiny single queen bed with no view - there was a full-on suite back behind the seating area and real artwork on the walls.

She crept over to her purse lying haphazardly at the foot of the bed. She fished out her phone, paused, and then dug out her wallet as well. The two condoms were exactly where she had left them, snuggled back behind the bills, pristine and unwrapped. She buried the evidence back in the depths of her purse and firmly but quietly locked herself in the bathroom. Feeling that extra precautions were still needed, she pulled the shower curtain shut after her, sat down in the tub, and slumped down low.

She dialed Jane's number and pressed her face into the blessedly cool porcelain tiles behind her as she listened to the phone ring. "C'mon," she muttered, "pick up, Jane..."

"You have reached the telephone of Lady Jane Foster, consort of Thor Odinson," Thor's voice boomed into her ear. She groaned and mashed her cheek further into the tiled wall. "Leave a message at the sound of thunder." From the background, she could hear her and Jane's voices yelling out "THUNDER!" together, tinnily happy in some lost, gloriously innocent past.

"Call me," she said shortly, and hung up to send a text message with the same plea before crawling out the tub. She had just made it out over the lip of the bathtub when a wave of nausea swept over her. She vomited into the toilet, threw up a second time for good luck, and pulled herself over to the sink to rinse her mouth out. She swished and spit a couple times before splashing a handful of cold water on her face and rubbing her eyes. She straightened up to look at herself in the mirror, and: O-kay. That was not what she was expecting.

She looked down at herself and registered what she'd been too hazily hungover to notice until now - she wasn't wearing the jeans she'd been wearing last night anymore, but had apparently upgraded at some point during the night to a pleated blue mini-skirt and a thin white belt. It all went rather conspicuously well with her low-cut red blouse, if you happened to have Captain America in your bed and enjoyed being as patriotically slutty as possible for the occasion.

"Winning at life," she muttered, and tried once more to pull the damn ring off.

Right. Ring: still attached to her finger. Skirt: barely pulling its weight in the clothing department. Captain America: potentially her husband, which Darcy really thought was a situation to be blamed equally on a) Jane's insistence that she celebrate her graduation with a trip to Las Vegas, a trip which just so happened to coincide with this year's Stark Expo, b) Tony Stark's ability to set aside R&D dollars for pet projects that boil down to 'How to get Captain America wasted', because apparently that's the sort of guy he is, and c) the fact that Captain America is genetically engineered to basically be the perfect man, so nobody can really blame her, right? Right? 

Her phone started to vibrate, the screen lighting up on the ground next to the toilet where she'd dropped it, and Darcy snapped it up. "Jane?" she asked in a low, urgent whisper.

"Darcy! Where _are_ you?"

Darcy closed her eyes. "I... I'm in a bathroom right now. Captain America's bathroom, actually?"

"Really?" Jane sounded cautiously pleased on the other end of the line. "I thought you two hit it off last night."

"Yeah. It's just that, well. It's not like that, exactly. Except maybe it is; I don't know? Anyway, the thing is..." she took a deep breath, "I-might-have-accidentally-Vegas-married-Captain-America-last-night."

There was a short silence on the other end of the line. "...what?" Jane asked flatly.

"...Yeah."

"You _married_ Steve last night?"

She pinched her eyes shut even more. "Unless there's another explanation for waking up in a bed with Captain America in Vegas with a diamond ring on my finger? Because I'd be all over that."

"You have a _ring_?" Jane's voice was rising in pitch now.

"Shhh," Darcy said unnecessarily. "And yeah. I can't get the stupid thing off."

"Pepper," said Jane abruptly.

"What?"

"Pepper, we need Pepper."

"Like, Pepper-Potts Pepper? CEO-of-Stark-Enterprises Pepper Potts needs to be involved in _this_?"

"You might have just married _Captain America_ , Darce. So, yes, we need Pepper Potts. You hold tight. I'll call you back." And with that, the line went dead.

Darcy looked up at herself in the mirror again and took a deep breath. "Right," she said softly. "You can do this." She flattened her hair out with her hands, flushed the toilet, and pulled down the back of her mini-skirt decisively.

\---

She opened the door as quietly as she could, but the sound from flushing the toilet or her frantically whispered conversation with Jane must have woken him up, because she caught him - _Captain America_ , how was this even her life? - in the process of swinging his feet out of the bed. He froze when he saw her, the bare soles of his feet still six inches off the floor. His pants were unzipped, baring a wedge of dark blue underwear underneath, his torso naked, and his hair was stuck up in the back like a commercial for really, really manly hair gel.

"Heey," she said awkwardly, and waved at him. Ten points for smoothness, folks.

"Miss Lewis?" he asked, and his eyes darted wildly about the room, like he expected several other people he knew to spontaneously burst in as well.

"That's me. So, um, I think we need to talk." She sat down next to him on the bed, trying not to let the mattress tip her too much in his direction. He was sitting up ramrod-straight, like he was in the middle of a dress inspection instead of shirtless and perched on the edge of an unmade bed. She glanced down at his left hand and sure enough, there was a thick gold ring there, gleaming dully in the thin light from the windows. 

He caught her gaze and glanced down at his hand as well. He paled, and quickly looked at her own. She held her hand up in a mute apology, confirming his unspoken question.

"I can't get it off," she explained sheepishly, feeling embarassed to still be wearing the gleaming thing.

"Oh, God," he said, and she knew just enough about Captain America to find this a pretty strongly worded statement on the situation.

"Tell me about it," she muttered.

He twisted the plain golden band around his finger, staring at it blankly. "Is that... is this real?"

"Like, did we for real get married, or is the ring real?"

"The marriage part. Is this legal? Did we really...?"

"Uh. Maybe? I'm not really well versed on the intricacies of Vegas nuptial law, but my knowledge of romantic comedies and Katy Perry songs suggests that, yeah, we're potentially married for real."

He eyes flew up to her face, and a faint redness crept into his expression as he regarded her.

"Did..." He swallowed. "Did we..."

"...Seal the deal? I... I don't know," she said, reevaluating her instinctive _no_ and considering the evidence. "I'm not sure. You don't remember?"

He hesitated, then shook his head no.

"So our clothing and the condoms still in my purse point to no. And, I guess I don't _feel_ like I had sex last night. Like, lady-parts-wise. But we were both drunk. We might have started something we were too wasted to finish."

He went even paler, but he cleared his throat and managed a respectable, "Okay."

An awkward silence fell between them at that. Steve rubbed the stocking-clad toe of his right food along the opposite calf muscle and, with a casualness that Darcy deeply admired, buttoned and zipped up his pants with what looked like a finely orchestrated shrugging motion. She fiddled with the ring on her finger, picking at it like an itch.

Apparently not actually having sex during your one night stand ( _marriage night_?) was not exactly a conversational starter.

"What do I call you?"

He looked up at her from his examination of the hotel's stunningly subtle carpeting choices, startled. "What?"

"I mean... Steve, right? I'm guessing we've passed the Rogers part of the relationship, and Captain America just makes me think of fifth grade history class. I could call you Cap, though. I'd be into that."

"Steve," he muttered, a strange note in his voice. "Please call me Steve."

She smiled, and stuck out her hand. "Nice to meet you, Steve. Again."

He smiled back at her tentatively, a little wane, but it was the first positive sign of life in his expression since they had started talking. He took her hand in his own and shook it gently. His fingers were large and dry wrapped around her own, the callouses on the tips of his fingers rubbing against the moist skin of her palm.

"Nice to meet you, ma'am."

"If you don't call me Darcy at this point, I will, like, for real punch you."

The hint of a real grin poked out at the edges of his small smile, and she suddenly remembered, in a weird, unsettling flush of memory, exactly how badly she had wanted to jump his bones last night. It had been the hint of something boyish hidden beneath the burnished surface of the way too perfect all-American exterior that she wanted to figure out, had wanted to chip away at his perfect jawline and weirdly robotic 1950s boy soldier manners to find something she sensed was more awkward and sharply _human_ underneath.

She had wanted to go at him like an archeologist.

Like an honest to god sex archeologist.

She closed her eyes, squeezing them shut hard, and felt a hand land on her shoulder like a bear paw. "Mm... Darcy? Are you okay?"

She opened her eyes back up and tugged her skirt back down, shaking her head. "No, I'm fine. I'm just... I'm fine. And you? How are you feeling?"

He rubbed a hand through his hair, leaving bits of corn-blonde sticking up in spikes here and there, and seemed to take honest stock of himself before answering. "Not too bad, I guess. Whatever it was that Tony engineered to get me drunk doesn't seem to leave much in the hangover department, at least."

"Lucky you. I've already thrown up twice in the bathroom, like a champ."

"Sorry." He apologized with the vague shame of somebody whose position in life was vastly superior to her own and uncomfortable with drawing attention to the fact.

"Really, it's not too bad. My friend Amanda - she was my roommate in college - she used to say that it's better to get that one out of the way early."

"I had a friend who used to say something like that too," he said softly, avoiding her eyes all of a sudden, and if _that_ wasn't an invitation to therapy city, Darcy didn't know what was.

She settled for a carefully neutral tone. "Smart guy."

"He was. You'd like him." He shrugged, the muscles in his shoulders shifting under his skin. "Everybody liked him."

"Okay."

"No, really. He got all the girls." He actually sounded _wistful_ when he said that, which was a pretty strong indicator that the dude was either part of the sepia-toned Captain America past or Steve was an indecently good friend and human being (because Darcy thought the whole deal sounded like a shit division of ladies, really). She wasn't going to bet against either option. Unless...

"Uh, you're not talking about Tony Stark, are you?"

Steve barked a short, surprised laugh. "Tony is _not_ universally loved."

"I don't know. The ladies seem to dig him. And he does have that whole mustache-slash-goatee thing going on."

"...also I was talking in the past tense."

"First clue, sure, but sometimes you need to make sure all your bases are covered."

"I'm not really sure what people see in mustaches anyway," he muttered.

"Pirate-y," she said. "A little bit Clark Gable, a little bit that sleazy European guy you pick up in some club who turns out to be an amazing kisser. You know. Or really, uh, maybe you don't. Tony would probably know. Or... well, um." She cut things off and rounded back in on the strongest part of her argument. " _Rhett Butler_ , man."

His stupid crooked grin started up again at the corner of his mouth, and seriously, why the fuck had she not slept with him last night instead of ending up with some joke of a ring on her finger and a morning chock full of awkwardness? Because she wanted to lick that smile clean off his face. It wasn't fair. She very firmly put aside the fact that if they'd managed to have a proper one-night stand like normal people, the chances were high that right now she'd be tucked up under the blanket with this man, blissfully sacked out and sleeping the good sleep of the well and properly sexed.

"You're a different sort of dame," he said, in a tone of voice that Darcy decided to think of as maybe just a little bit admiring.

"What a coincidence, that's what I was voted in my high school yearbook. Most likely to be a different sort of dame."

Steve raised an eyebrow. "Sarcasm."

"Ten points."

"Do these points earn me anything?" Steve asked, and holy shit, maybe they could save this one after all, because right now she was pretty sure what was happening was that Steve was maybe trying to _flirt_ with her, matched set of wedding rings and all.

"Only if you're good," she said, and leaned toward him, tipping her body closer to his, the mattress shifting under her weight. She nudged him with her shoulder. "Hey. So I have a question for you."

"Yeah?"

"It's an important question."

"Sure."

"...Do you remember what happened to my pants?" She bit back a grin at Steve's expression, enjoying herself for the first time since spotting the whole ring-on-the-finger fiasco, and gestured downward in an overly tragic look-at-what-God-hath-wrought gesture.

He blinked, owlishly, and his gaze slipped down to the line of her upper thigh where the blue mini-skirt was inexorably inching its way upward again. He cleared his throat, staring vacantly at her bare legs. "Ah. I think I remember you saying at one point that we should maybe, uh, match."

"Match?"

"You needed to be more festive?" he tried again, rubbing at his forehead now, one hand dipping down to tug at an earlobe. "I remember something about sparklers."

"Sparklers," she repeated.

He nodded.

"So I, what? Traded up?"

He gestured in a way that said _you are now working with the same knowledge I have and since you are here in a patriotically themed scrap of fabric masquerading as an article of clothing we both know the answer to that question is a resounding yes_.

She pursed her lips together. "Fab," she said finally, nodding to herself.

"...I lost my shirt," he offered gallantly.

It was slim consolation considering that America probably wrote him a giant thank you card whenever that fortuitous event happened, coupled with her knowledge that it was merely crumpled up on the floor on the opposite side of the bed. She considered playing the long game and keeping that key piece of intel in reserve, but her basic sense of decency won out. She might need to rethink a career in SHIELD if she couldn't harden her heart when faced with A+ abs and pecs.

"It's on the floor, over there," she said, nodding to the far side of the bed.

For a moment she thought his sense of fair play (and solidarity with her lost-in-action pants) was going to keep him seated where he was and gloriously shirtless, but he seemed to realize the futility of the gesture as she did and executed a barrel-roll across the sheets, coming up clutching a plain white t-shirt. The thick muscles of his back corded and stretched as he pulled the shirt on in a single, economical motion.

He stared at her from across the bed, and any trace of the hard-earned ease that they'd created faded from his expression as he considered her. His eyes were a clear blue-gray, his lashes a thick sooty black, strikingly dark in his California-boy golden complexion. She licked her lips, and she saw his eyes flicker uncertainly to her mouth, just for a second.

Her phone beeped, and she dove for it on the rumpled bedspread.

It was a text from Jane:

_pepper found the certificate, def. married last night  
will call soon_

Her heart thumped in her chest, skipping beats. _Damn._ "It's from Jane," she said, trying for casual, and tossed him the phone. He caught it one-handed, snapping his hand out freakily fast, like if a venus fly trap was a person too.

Steve frowned down at the screen, then his gaze flew back up to hers. She swallowed hard.

"Married," he said softly, a king-size landscape of twisted sheets and rucked-up blankets between them. "We're really married."

"Apparently." She looked down, and caught sight of her ring again. It was a pretty thing, with graceful gold curlicues wrapped around a solitaire diamond. There were two small pinpoints of red to either side of the diamond - rubies, maybe? - that were distinctively different for a wedding ring, sparkling a deep red, with gold filigree curled around them.

"We need an annulment," she said. She managed by sheer force of will to keep the statement from turning into a question, because the alternative was ridiculous.

"I..." he started to say, then broke off. "Yes. We do. It's not that... " He stopped himself again, biting his lip.

"Preaching to the choir on this one, dude."

"Right," he said, and huffed an odd, strained laugh. He flipped her cell phone idly in his hand, the large, blunt-tipped fingers curled around the edges, and tipped his chin toward it. "So Jane is...?"

"...Yeah. I called her from the bathroom earlier. I hope that's okay. She said we needed help on this one, so she was going to call Pepper. Pepper Potts," she clarified stupidly, like he's not going to be sure which of the many Peppers of the world she means. "I don't really know much more about it than that right now. Except for, um, what you know too."

He nodded, still staring at the shiny black screen clutched in his fist. "I guess we wait, then."

\---

Several minutes later, each more silently awkward than the last, her phone _finally_ rang. Steve, who had resumed what was probably a grad-level study of the hotel room carpeting at this point, looked up she answered.

"Jane?"

"Darcy. Is Steve still there?" Jane asked.

Darcy glanced over at Steve, who was watching her from across the bed with a blank expression, the soldier mask down hard again. "Yeah, the Cap and I have been bonding. I think we're almost to the part where he braids my hair and I paint his toenails. You know, married-people stuff."

"Very funny. Listen, can you put me on speaker phone? I have Pepper on the other line. She wants to fill you both in on what's happening."

"Sure." She set the phone down in speaker mode between them, mouthing the word "Pepper" and raising her eyebrows. He swung his long legs back around on the bed to move a little closer to her.

"Steve? Are you there?" asked Jane's voice, distorted by the tiny speakers.

"Dr. Foster," Steve said. She remembered Jane kissing Steve's cheek when they'd arrived at the bar the previous night, smiling up at the height of him, as Thor slapped a congenial hand down on Steve's shoulder with a force that would have leveled a lesser man.

"Just give me a... hold on..." There was a silence, then a short series of dissonant electronic beeps culminating in a piercing, unearthly screech. "Pepper?" said Jane on the phone once the noise had cleared. "Are you there? Hello?"

"Here," a woman's voice said. "Thank you, Jane. Is Steve there?"

"Miss Potts," said Steve, and Darcy could hear the nascent warmth in the way he said her name, title and all. Darcy had seen pictures of Pepper Potts in magazines, nearly always paired with Tony Stark in some way, and her sole impression of the woman was that of black suits, stylishly disciplined red hair, and a piercingly calm expression. It was tough to imagine the Tony Stark she had met last night, jittery like a child and shockingly intelligent, paired with such a woman, and hearing Steve's voice deepen when he said Pepper's name made her feel that she had wandered into a web of relationships she had only the faintest grasp on.

"Does Tony know?" Steve asked with no preamble, and there was a short pause on the line before Pepper answered.

"Not right now."

"...So that's going to be a yes."

"Sorry, Steve," and Darcy swore she heard a thin line of amusement streaking through Pepper's voice.

"Swell," Steve muttered, rubbing a hand over his face. "I am never going to hear the end of this."

"Probably not," Pepper agreed easily. "You know Tony."

Steve frowned mightily at the phone, and Darcy bit back the urge the narrate the gesture for the benefit of their listening audience.

Pepper cleared her throat. "...Miss Lewis? Are you there?"

"...Present," she said, feeling like an eight year old kid.

"Miss Lewis, it's a pleasure. I'm sorry we're not meeting under different circumstances."

"Call me Darcy," she said. "Seriously, Steve and I already arm-wrestled over this, and I'm pretty sure I won, so, Darcy." She reevaluated the sentence and decided it sounded a little pushy. "Please."

"It's good to meet you, Darcy. Call me Pepper," she said, dry humor laced through her voice again before shifting, taking on a decidedly business-like twang. "I'm sure you're wondering what's going on. Here's what I know so far - there's a signed marriage certificate at the chapel; I think Jane already told you that. It's valid. We're still trying to figure out how far into the system the paperwork made it from there, though, so as of right now we're dealing with anything from a public annulment to, ideally, being able to make it seem as if the marriage never happened."

"Really? You might be able to just make everything go... poof?" Darcy asked.

"We are talking about Stark Industries and SHIELD," Jane said, a little sourly.

"Running a company headed by Tony Stark means that we have some... unique resources at our disposal," Pepper continued, tactfully ignoring Jane's righteously sarcastic commentary. "We can lock down all physical evidence of the marriage, and we are working on having everybody involved in the wedding sign generous non-disclosure agreements. Assuming we're able to keep containment, which at this time we believe is possible, and assuming that we get lucky with some of the government bureaucracy above that, yes, we have a decent chance of completely keeping this away from the public." She paused, delicately. "If that's what you two want, of course."

"Yes," said Steve, with a grimly determined expression that Darcy figured was probably his I'm-gonna-fight-the-Nazis look. "It is."

"...Darcy?" asked Jane.

"Of course," she said, trying not to snap. "What Steve said."

She heard a rustling over the phone, like papers being shuffled. "Right. The second thing you should know is that the rest of the Vegas... well, that's a different story. The area is too large for containment - there's too much flux over too large of an area. Anybody with a cell phone or a camera, whatever you did after leaving the bar, any of it could be sold to the media, and unfortunately it looks like, from our early monitoring of the situation, some of it already has. Even assuming we're able to keep the wedding itself under wraps, you two should brace yourselves."

"What does that mean?" Jane asked.

"It means that Captain America is a very public figure, one who has lived in our world for the past year without any hint of rumors linking him romantically to anybody except perhaps Tony," Pepper's voice was wry, "and the sight of him out with an unknown woman in Vegas is going to be a major news story."

"There are pictures of us?" asked Steve. "Of the two of us?"

"At the very least," Pepper said. "Do you remember what you did before going to the chapel?"

"Not really," said Darcy. "I remembering walking on the strip, and... and maybe going into another bar or two."

Steve frowned, looming over the phone between them like an overly aggressive pair of shoulders. "I don't remember much more than Darcy. Walking around. I remember shopping for a while, or looking at souvenirs, something like that. We might have... we might have been kissing at some point. It might have been in public. I can't remember." Darcy looked up at him, but he studiously avoided her eyes.

"Right. Well, we'll monitor the situation and let you know how things develop. In the meantime, though, I recommend you two lay low for a while. Stick to your rooms, or the non-public areas of the hotel, and we'll know a lot more about what we're facing by the end of the day."

"Will do," Steve said crisply, and for one surreal moment Darcy was sure he was actually going to salute the phone.

"Sure," she said. "I can do that. Being paparazzied doesn't sound like the awesomest day anyway."

"Tony loves it, which is all us sane people need to know," said Pepper. "I'll have JARVIS update everybody in a couple hours, assuming nobody has anything to add right now."

"Pepper," Steve said, "you're a life saver."

Darcy could hear the smile in her voice. "Just doing my job, Captain."

"Darce, I'll call you again soon, okay?" Jane said. "I'm just going to--" There was a loud beeping again, and a muffled thump on the line. "Damn it! Sorry guys, I think we just lost Pepper. Next time, JARVIS runs the call, not ye olde cellphone. Look, I'll talk to you soon too, Steve."

"Thanks, Jane. For everything."

Jane snorted, eloquently and with no little amusement. "Oh, trust me. Anytime."

Darcy shook her head, her finger hovering over the end button. "Shut it, Lady J."

"You like me," Jane said smugly, and the line went dead.

\---

Darcy collected her purse, Steve awkwardly mirroring her motion and standing at parade attention next to the bed. She was wondering how Emily Post would suggest handling the whole goodbye situation with your one-night stand husband (hug? high five? run for it?) and ended up sticking out her hand to shake his for lack of a better inspiration. He stared at her for a moment before enveloping her hand in his own, the pads of his fingertips touching easily around the bone of her wrist.

"Um, so I'll talk to you later?"

"Yes," he said softly, watching her.

"Okay," she said, and the hotel door closed quietly behind her.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Continuing thanks to [51stcenturyfox](http://51stcenturyfox.livejournal.com/) for her mad awesome beta-ing skills. And thank you to everybody who left a comment or kudos on the first chapter!

She slept through two email summaries from JARVIS, six separate texts from Jane, one boisterous voicemail from Thor calling to reminisce about the previous night's exploits, and a terse email from a former roommate about paying her share of the last month's rent. All in all, it was a pretty epic nap.

And even with that, it still took an obscenely long shower, swapping out her contacts for her glasses, and pulling on her oldest pair of blue jeans topped off with an aging hoodie before she started to feel like a functioning human being again.

She decided to start with texting Jane back.

\---

Jane swung the two plain paper bags enticingly under Darcy's nose as she opened the door. They were dark with grease and smelled of hamburger and salty fries and everything that was right in the world, 

"I picked up some food for you, if you think your stomach can handle it."

"YES," Darcy said, snatching the nearest bag. She peeled back the waxed wrapper from a cheeseburger and took a bite. Her eyes might have rolled back in their head at the explosion of cheesy, greasy goodness that flooded her mouth. "Jane Foster," she moaned, "you are a _goddess_."

It came out more than a bit pornographic, but Darcy couldn't fault herself, because at that moment she was kind of wishing she'd put a ring on the burger and locked _it_ down last night. It was _that good_.

"I know," Jane said brightly, setting down the second bag on the table and propping her chin up on her fist. "But less about me. Let's talk about you - specifically, your World War II-era husband who wears spangly tights."

"Can't chat right now," Darcy mumbled around a mouthful of fries. "I don't think I've eaten solid food in, like, a day."

"Excuses, excuses," Jane grumbled, but pushed what appeared to be a chocolate shake in her direction. Darcy grabbed it and shot Jane a look of intense BFF-level gratitude.

Two burgers and a small village's worth of french fries later, Darcy happily pushed herself back from the tiny coffee table that comprised her hotel room's only nod to social guests, and took a celebratory look-at-all-the-food-I-just-ate sip from the chocolate shake.

"Okay," Jane said sternly. " _Spill._ "

"Well, first off - I don't think you get to talk smack about Steve's wonder boy outfit, not with the getup that Thor runs around in. The man wears a cape. A red, flowing cape. Spangly tights are the least of a superhero's worries."

"He only wears it on formal occasions!"

"...Red cape! Winged helmet! Phallic-y giant hammer! And what, is every day that ends in a -y a formal occasion?"

Jane settled back in her chair and crossed her arms. "Touché, Lewis."

"Damn straight. So, then, ah..." she faltered a little, "...here's the second thing." Darcy held her hand out over the table and Jane snatched it between her own, bending Darcy's wrist this way and that to examine the diamond ring in the sunlight from the window.

"It's nice," Jane said finally.

"I know," Darcy groaned. "That just makes this whole thing even worse. Because the ring is nice and Steve is astronomically nice - I'm pretty sure that's, like, his entire job description - and it makes the whole thing just that much more tragic."

"I notice you're calling him Steve now," Jane observed mildly.

"Yeah, whatever, I've joined the company of all the cool people who are on a first name basis with Captain America."

Jane leaned forward. "Seriously, Darcy. What happened last night?"

" _So many things_ that I can't remember." Darcy slumped forward and hugged her chocolate milkshake in tight. "Apparently we had a one-night epic love affair that neither of us can recall, and what the fuck kind of way is that for the universe to treat somebody?"

"You're talking to the woman who fell in love with a guy who literally fell out of the sky, turned out to be a Norse god, and disappeared again a few days later. The universe sucks."

"Says you, Ms. Look-At-My-Happy-Ending-And-The-Abs-On-This-My-Boyfriend-The-Actual-God."

"Okay, I've never seen Steve without a shirt on, but I'm not buying the pity party on that one."

Darcy took another sip of her shake and smiled. "The abs _were_ pretty great."

Jane raised her eyebrows. "And...?"

"And what?"

Jane widened her eyes and tipped her head toward her. "... _And_?"

"...Okay, I really don't know what you're and-ing. And... we didn't have sex? At least that neither of us can remember? I don't even remember making out with Steve, not even a little, and that might be the biggest joke of my entire life."

"Steve said he remembered kissing you."

"Proves your point. The universe sucks."

Jane snagged a cold french fry from the cardboard carton. "So you're sure you didn't have sex?"

"No, not at all. Evidence points to no, but we woke up in bed together, unclothed enough that maybe we started to get there, and - oh fuck, I'm not on birth control right now. _Fuck._ " Visions of super-sperm, gearing up to do battle in the foreign territory of her uterus, flashed weirdly before her eyes, scrolling by like one of those old black-and-white reels of Captain America punching out Hitler and then smiling broadly for the camera.

Jane paused, the fry halfway to her mouth. "Guess that means no condom then, huh."

"Nope. Damn it." She pinched the bridge of her nose. She really did not need to deal with the possibility of pregnancy on top of everything else today. "I guess I'll run out and see if I can get something."

"You know, SHIELD has extensive medical resources..."

"Uh, no. Double no. I don't want to go in for a health exam with my maybe-future employer and have to explain I might have accidentally been knocked up by their star superhero in a forgotten night of debauchery. I'll just run to a Walgreens or something."

"Need my help?"

"You already brought me awesome food and totally made the right call to sic Pepper Potts on the problem. You've pretty much aced the friendship test."

"So you're good?"

"Yeah, I can handle it. I'll do it celeb-style, and dig up a baseball cap and some big sunglasses."

Jane absently tapped the french fry a couple times on the table like a cigarette, looking her over carefully. "Really, though, Darcy... are you okay?"

She buried her head in her hands, took a deep breath, and raked her fingers back through her still-damp hair. "...I don't know. I'm mostly fine, but... I'm also not. I think I'm still trying to sort out what actually happened."

"That's understandable."

"It's just... I really liked Steve. I mean, I think I like him. I mean, I haven't even known him for 24 hours yet. This whole thing is seriously messed up. We jumped so far past first-date territory that I don't even know if it's possible to back up again."

Jane pursed her lips together, but didn't say anything. Instead, she took Darcy's hand again and wiggled the ring thoughtfully, testing it against the swell of her knuckle.

"Want some help getting this thing off?"

"I thought you'd never ask."

\---

Darcy hesitated, tapping her finger a couple times against the trackpad of her laptop, before opening up a browser.

Perez Hilton and E! were clean. TMZ, however, had small byline underneath a blurry cellphone photo, sandwiched between the latest update on Lindsay Lohan's rehab and Miley Cyrus heading to the studio for a new album.

Her hair was down in the photo, swinging forward enough to obscure her features, and apparently she'd gone for the mini-skirt by this time in the evening - Steve's hand was wrapped around her hip, his fingers pressed into the fabric of the skirt, hiking it up even higher. She had to admit, from a purely academic point of view, she looked _good_ showing that much leg.

She was leaning into his side carelessly, her arm wound up in his, and Steve's head was tilted back, eyes closed, mouth open slightly. It took her a moment to realize that he was mid-laugh.

_Everybody's favorite WWII superhero showed us a different side of his clean-cut all-American image last night... and TMZ has the exclusive photos to prove it! Captain America was out for a night on the Strip, visiting several Las Vegas clubs and bars with the unknown woman pictured above. Was it a one-night Vegas fling, or does Steve Rogers have a new beau?_

_SEE ALSO:_  
 _Tony Stark -- SEE the Stark Expo Blooper Reel!_  
 _Steve Rogers -- America's Golden Boy Hits the Waves_  
 _Charlie Sheen -- Apologizes to Tiger At LA Zoo_

She stared at the picture. The quality was grainy and blurred around the edges with motion, but they looked _happy_ , relaxed and open, body language tipped in toward each other and his large hand splayed out around the bone of her hip.

They looked indecently, illegally, totally unfairly happy. Ugh.

She shoved a cheap plastic pair of sunglasses on her face, pulled her ponytail back through a baseball cap, and headed out.

\---

He opened the door on the third knock, sweatpants hanging off his hips and and sporting what she was beginning to guess was one of a vast multitude of t-shirts he kept in rotation plastered to his body like a second skin. Today's lucky shirt was gray with a black SHIELD logo screen printed on the front.

He scrubbed a hand back through his hair, and she noticed that he was still wearing the ring from this morning, the thick gold gleaming dully. "...Miss Lewis?" The room behind him was dark.

"Oh, hey, sorry - I didn't wake you up, did I?"

"No, I've just been out on the balcony." He blinked into the light of the hallway. "You're wearing glasses."

"The better to see you with, my dear," she said, and slid them down her nose to give him a librarian look, arching an eyebrow. "Also, sleeping in contacts makes my eyes feel all gunky, so, bonus."

He stared at her, silent for long enough that she started to feel a little awkward, standing in the hallway with her glasses perched on the end of her nose and wearing a hoodie with the fabric worn thin at the elbows and a velociraptor stalking around the hem. She remembered the photo of them from last night, and wondered how they had ever been those two people.

He cleared his throat, and the odd moment passed. "I could use some company. If you like."

She made a show of considering it. "Well, I was really only stopping by to make a few Red Riding Hood references and split - but what the heck, I guess I can hang out for a while."

Steve's balcony overlooked the strip. Car horns and the steady buzz of distant conversation wafted up through the air, and only a few stars were visible above them, valiantly fighting to be seen through the bubble of ambient light that surrounded the city. The sky was a dim grey, lighter at the edges, and the street in front of them was like a fireworks display frozen in time, brilliantly bright and full of neon color.

She fished the wedding ring out from where it was tucked away in the front pocket of her hoodie.

"Hey," she said, more seriously, "so I actually stopped by to give you the ring back. I managed to get it off my finger this afternoon, with the help of some pretty rank smelling lotion and Jane almost yanking my finger off."

She held the ring out to him, and he took it from her carefully. The thin band of gold looked even smaller pinched together between his fingertips.

"I think you bought it?" she continued. "At least, I checked my credit card and didn't see a charge for it, so that's my best guess right now."

"Thanks," he said. He rolled the band between his fingers, rotating the diamond at the top back and forth in a semi-circle. He seemed hypnotized by the motion, and then his gaze slid down to the ring around his own finger. He pulled it off in a swift, decisive motion and placed both rings, side by side, on the square metal bar at the top of the railing.

"I was keeping mine on until you were able to get your ring off," he said, sounding a little embarrassed by the gesture.

"Dude. That was incredibly thoughtful. Thank you."

He nodded. "It's the least I could do." 

So, awkward item number one on her agenda: Done. Awkward item number two: Up to bat.

Being an adult sucked sometimes.

"...I also came here to tell you that I got the morning-after pill today, so we're covered there."

He looked over at her with blank curiosity. "I don't know what that is."

And _of course_ nothing was that easy. "Oh. It's a pill that... prevents unplanned pregnancies."

"Oh," he echoed, his voice suddenly strange, and his eyes skipped away from her again to watch the strip, crawling with people underneath their feet.

"Since we couldn't remember, and if anything did happen we didn't use a condom... I thought it seemed like a good idea. You're, like," she fluttered a hand at his entire body, encompassing the length, " _you_ , and it's possible to get pregnant without doing much, it's just really unlikely. Except in your case we also might be dealing with, I don't know, genetically engineered super sperm. It seemed like a good idea. Just in case."

Red had seeped into his cheeks, giving them a faint glow like he'd just been exercising (or whatever the superhero equivalent of normal-person exercising would be - it made her feel exhausted to even contemplate the options there). "Do you think...."

"Honestly, no. But better safe than sorry."

"Yeah. But it never occurred to me," he said, his voice turning low and thoughtful. "I hadn't thought about it."

"Right. Well, no Captain America babies! That's my motto. Um, that's not a global statement, because I guess that could be a thing that you actually want, you know, with, ah..." She shut herself up fast, because if there was ever a sentence that was going to end up no place good, _that was it_. For fuck's sake.

He was quiet a moment before adding, his diction careful, like he was saying a sentence he'd never had reason to speak before, "I don't have any venereal diseases."

It was probably the sweetest way anybody had ever told her not to worry about STDs. "Thanks," she said. "I'm clean too. So we're cool on my front."

He nodded, and his hands relaxed a little from where they were gripping the railing.

"You know what," she said, "I think we deserve to give each other an adult high-five for having that conversation. Because we pretty much just rocked at life."

He laughed - the laugh was low and short, but still, he _laughed_ and gave her a small but genuine smile before holding up his hand. She slapped it enthusiastically, then tried to shake out her hand as discreetly as possible because _oh my god_ the man was like hitting a brick wall.

"Excellent," she said. "That's the last of the awkward conversational topics off of my list."

He snorted, and Darcy tried to tamper down the thrill she felt, heady and a little troubling, at making him laugh. The feeling shot through her like electricity, squeezing at her heart so that it thumped erratically in her chest and shorted her breath.

"I've never had to do this before. I'm so sorry for making this awkward." He said it like an apology.

"You know, I'm pretty new to the whole post-Vegas-marriage racket too. And that conversation was going to be a little awkward no matter what. As these things go, I think we're pretty much knocking this one out of the park."

"Really?"

"For sure," she said firmly.

"Good," he said, sounding a little easier.

"So..." She cleared her throat. "I did want to ask you - from the list of things which are less awkward but maybe still weird - but, what's the last thing you remember? I mean, the very last thing. I've been trying to remember what happened all day now."

He closed his eyes, and his nostrils flared. "It gets so blurry. I remember you laughing - you couldn't stop laughing, you were bent over and you said it made your stomach hurt, you were laughing so hard."

"I remember the laughing," she said, slowly.

"And..." his eyes were still closed, "I remember..."

His eyes snapped back open.

"What?"

He fidgeted, staring at her intently, and reached a hand out toward her tentatively, before snatching it back like she was hot lava, giving her a desperately uncertain look.

"Seriously, what is it?"

"Can I just... can you turn around, please?"

"Like, away-from-you turn around?" She twirled a finger in illustration.

"Yes."

"Sure, I guess." She rotated one hundred and eighty degrees, putting Steve behind her, and jumped a little when she felt him place a hand flat against the small of her back. "What's going on?" she asked, trying to twist her head around and not freak out because Steve was seriously starting to weird her out.

"I'm going to check something. Okay?" His voice was steady now, like he'd flipped a switch and turned on his Captain America mode. It was the kind of tone she could imagine him using with a wounded soldier or a flighty woodland creature he was trying to tame, and she really shouldn't be surprised that that analogy made Steve the Disney princess of this whole scenario, because _look at him_.

His hand slipped under the hem of her hoodie, the pads of his fingers warm against the skin of her back, and tugged the fabric up a couple inches.

"Shit, I don't have a tattoo, do I? Some sort of crazy SHIELD tattooing technology that doesn't itch or hurt and now I've got your name on an anchor as a tramp stamp, oh my god. Steve, you've got to talk to me right now."

"It isn't a tattoo," he said softly, and she felt his finger trace _something_ on the small of her back. "I drew this."

"Drew _what_?"

"It's my shield," he said in the same low tone, and she realized with a sudden shiver that the shape he was tracing on her skin was a circle. Goosebumps broke out on her arms as his finger drew a slow, even path around the base of her spine.

"The Captain America shield?" She tried to crane her neck around a few more precious millimeters.

He breathed out hard, like he hadn't even been aware that he'd been holding his breath. "Yeah. My shield."

"You drew your _shield_ on my back last night?"

He straightened up again to his full height behind her, and she realized that even in the few moments he'd been crouching down, she'd already started to take his sheer size and bulk for granted. "It's okay - it's in marker."

"...Permanent marker? Hold on," she fumbled in her purse, searching by touch for her phone, "I have a camera." She unlocked her phone and handed it over, and realized only a split-second later that she wasn't sure Steve would know what's-what in iPhone land, but he just squinted at the display for a second and got down to business. The guy had been dealing with Stark tech for the last year, so really, she shouldn't be surprised.

The shield sat low on her back, half hidden by the line of her jeans, blood red concentric circles and a white-on-blue star outlined in black at the middle. It was about the size of her fist. She stared at it on the screen of her phone and she could _feel_ the thing now, like a brand, burning on her back. 

"It looks good," he offered, a little uncertainly, when she didn't say anything. His voice was rough. And yeah, she got that, because knowing that he had used her skin as a signpost of whatever crazy feeling had made them get married last night made her feel strangely nervous.

She twisted an arm back to rub her fingers over the base of her spine. It didn't feel like anything.

"I like to draw," he continued. "Mostly buildings, architecture, that sort of thing."

"I can tell," she made herself say. "It does look good."

"I have sketchbooks of the different places I've been. I don't have the ones from before, though, not anymore. And the war didn't leave much time for," he pressed his lips together tightly for a moment, and she watched him, momentarily forgetting the shield on her back, as it occurred to her that this was a man who had been fighting World War II - as in _actually fighting_ , on the front lines of god-knows-where - only a year ago, and life hadn't exactly been a model of stability and sanity for him since then.

"I can see that," she said, more quietly. "I always wished I could draw."

"I can't imagine not being able to draw."

"I'll imagine it for you then," she said, and poked him gently with an elbow to show she was teasing him.

Something shifted at the corner of his mouth at that, and all of a sudden Steve just looked... well, _sad_ in a way that made him seem oddly ancient for the first time, like a forgotten and once-loved relic brought out and shined up to be put behind glass in a museum.

"How old are you?" she asked abruptly.

"Ninety four," he answered, but his tone was automatic and weirdly mocking. She thought she heard an echo of Tony Stark in the answer.

"No... I mean, how old are you, really?"

"Uh. Twenty eight?" He rubbed at his eyes. "It's hard to know for sure unless I sit down and work it out."

"Hmm," she murmured. It was strange to think that he wasn't much older than she was.

He was looking at her curiously now, his gaze openly cataloging her. "How about you?"

"How old do you think I am?"

"You just graduated from college, so... twenty two?"

"Well." She coughed. "Twenty four, actually - that's what multiple long internships that aren't related to your field of study get you."

Steve didn't say anything to that, and her eyes dropped back down to her phone, which was fading slowly to black. She swiped a thumb over the screen.

"I can't believe I've been walking around with something like that on me for an entire day, and I didn't even realize it," she said. "It's so weird."

She stared at the photo, and some thing, some _memory_ peeked out cautiously from the back of her mind.

"...Hey, Steve," she said slowly, as one thought connected to another which connected to what was, dimly and finally, a useful memory of the previous night. "We should check you too. Your back, I mean."

The double-take he did was almost comical. "What?" he asked, and craned his head back awkwardly over his shoulder, followed the motion like a dog chasing its tail, and rotated around a full 360 degrees.

"Hold still," she said, batting his hands away, and yanked up his shirt from where it was tucked into his sweatpants (and seriously, who the hell _tucked their t-shirt in_ when wearing sweatpants?) and spotted the top of a few unsteady cursive loops of what was definitely her handwriting. She wondered how she hadn't noticed it this morning, but she had been doing rather more staring at the front of his naked chest than the back. She wedged a finger underneath the elastic band of his sweatpants to tug his waistline down a few more inches and tried to ignore the feeling of muscles shifting underneath her fingertips and the fact that this was a man who had the waist span of a ten year old girl.

...And she finally got a good look at what was scrawled, unevenly, across his lower back.

She laughed, bit it back quickly, and slapped a hand over her mouth. The whole thing ended in an attractive sort of hooting gargle that she was totally sure was the kind of thing that brought the boys to her metaphorical yard.

Steve whirled around to face her. "What?"

"You... I wrote something. On you."

"You wrote on me?"

"Shoe's on the other foot now, huh, soldier?"

He crossed his arms over his chest and stared down at her, impressively.

"Don't give me that look, you logo-ed me up like the way those girls were painted on the noses of planes!"

"What does it say?"

She started to laugh again, turned it into a cough, and, to her horror, felt something like a blush start to heat up her face. "It says _Property of Darcy Lewis_. I might had signed my name back there."

He stared at her, and a smile cracked at the corner of his mouth. "Really?"

She nodded, and bit down hard on the bubbling feeling of hilarity floating around inside of her.

The hint of a grin spilled out to the rest of his face and he started to laugh, catching his nose between his thumb and ring finger as he gulped in air, and she joined him. A couple people below them looked up at the noise, tilting their faces upward and squinting into the darkness above them, their features backlit by Vegas's artificial day.

"Let me see one more time," she said, gesturing behind him, and he turned for her obediently. She licked her finger and scrubbed over the black line of ink that curled up above the line of his pants, and spent a brief, glorious moment contemplating how marvelous it was to have something like that scrawled over the top of an ass like _that_.

"I think it's permanent marker? At least, it doesn't look like it's rubbing off easily."

"Yours didn't look faded at all," he said, watching her more easily now. It wasn't that his posture was any less obnoxiously perfect, but there was a miniscule droop to his shoulders that hadn't been there a minute before, like he wasn't constantly tensed for an unknown evildoer to leap out of nowhere and punch him in the face.

She wondered if he felt like they were even, again.

"So you remembered that?" he asked.

"Yeah, a little bit."

He smiled at her, and damned if he didn't accomplish that gesture as sweetly as possible. She felt almost giddy with the sensation. "So what else do you remember, then?"

"Hmm." She tightened her grip on the metal railing and leaned away from it, feeling a warm stretch across her shoulders. "I remember you said you could kick my ass in video games. You were talking some serious smack about it."

"I'm positive I did not use those words."

"Tomato, tomahto, dude. I know a throwdown when I hear one."

"I was trying to impress you," he protested, doing an admirable job of achieving near mythical levels at the twin skills of deflecting inquiries into talent and being obscenely humble.

"And you thought I'd be the type of girl who'd be impressed that you beat Tony Stark's ego into a pulp through the competitive medium of two-player Mario Kart. Because you're right. You're totally right." She grinned. "It was hot."

He did something with his shoulders that it took her a minute to realize was shrugging in a way that was supposed to be both self-deprecating and a little cocky at the same time. "Tony built a robot that beats me in Mario Kart," he said. "I think that means he won in the end."

"Oh my god. Seriously? Tell me you at least gave the robot a run for its money. Does it have a name?"

"Yes, it was close, and Karty-with-a-k."

"...Karty?"

"Tony's a pretty literal guy."

"I can see that. Iron Man. Stark Tower. Dude's got a Hemingway-esque knack for calling a spade a spade. I suppose you can't give him much shit about that, though, what with the whole patriotism-in-your-face Captain America name thing."

"I didn't call myself that," he pointed out. He looked panicked at the idea that he would have been the one to name his own superhero alter ego.

She waved it away. "Either way, Tony Stark built a robot solely to beat you at video games. I think that means you're awesome."

He smiled crookedly. "Maybe," he said, and that was probably the closest she was ever going to get to an outright brag here.

"Well, you're on. You'll probably wipe the floor with me, but I've got a few fifth-grade tricks up my sleeves." She cracked her knuckles. "I'm crafty."

"I believe you."

"Damn straight," she said. "I don't mess around."

"I believe that too."

"Careful, all this positive reinforcement is going to go to my head."

"Now that I don't believe."

"Mixed messages, I like it. Or," she scrunched up her nose, "maybe not-so-mixed messages?"

"Yeah, I'm not sure either anymore." He was smiling now, his hands clasped together in front of him. "So, anything else? That you remember, I mean."

The diamond of her ring, sitting on the railing, caught and refracted the neon light of the city in small pulses of color as she watched it. The gold curves of the two rings glowed.

"I remember drinking in the bar with Jane and Thor and Tony, but I imagine you remember most of that too. Then it gets a lot more jumpy. I remember... ah... throwing up somewhere? And you were rubbing the back of my neck, like the awesome guy that you are." His hand had been warm and soothing, wrapped around the base of her skull like her own personal heating pad, his fingers tangled up in the damp tendrils of her hair and his thumb kneading absently at the spot just under her ear, on the jawline. She still had a visceral, almost physical, memory of how good that it had felt.

Steve stared down at his feet. "Oh. I had a different pair of shoes when I woke up this morning. I was wondering about that."

"Oh, dude! I'm so sorry."

"I wasn't attached to the pair I lost. These are nice, too."

"...Right then, so I guess we got you new shoes at whatever time I bought that mini-skirt thing? I have to say, the fact that we stopped in the middle of whatever the hell we were doing last night to go clothes shopping is so fucking weird to me."

"But practical," Steve pointed out earnestly, and yup, she could pretty much put a bow on whose idea the shopping part had been last night.

"It's probably the best idea either of us had last night, so kudos. Even if it did end in me deciding I needed to up my quota of patriotic outfits."

Steve nodded seriously, all _yeah-I-know_.

"And what about you? Do you remember anything about..." She trailed off, then settled for nodding meaningfully in the direction of the rings, sitting on the metal lip of the railing.

"Well," Steve tried out, and licked his lips. "Not really, no. I don't remember anything like that."

Darcy's eyes flew back up to his face at the reappearance of a sudden odd strain in his voice.

His hands tightened around the metal railing. "But I do remember, the very last thing I remember... is that we were, ah, necking. Kissing. I don't remember where."

"You get all the good memories," she grumbled, but Steve didn't even look over at her.

He took a deep breath. "We were kissing. And I really, really wanted..." He stopped and shook his head, and he was visibly breathing faster now. "Well. I _wanted_." His voice fell to barely a whisper. "And I remember thinking, _I could if she was my wife_."

"Oh, fuck," she breathed.

He looked at her again, his expression a heady mix of embarrassment and something far more serious. She swallowed thickly.

"I would have slept with you without the ring," she said, trying to make it sound like a joke and totally failing.

He closed his eyes. "I'm sorry."

 _Shit._ "No, I was... look. You didn't throw me over your shoulder and force me to marry you in some backwoods podunk chapel. I was there too, you know. I married you just as much as you married me. We both obviously thought it was an awesome idea at the time." 

"I really..." he tried, then paused. "I..."

"I really wanted to sleep with you last night. Like, kind of desperately bad. You were... I was really into you," she finished, a little lamely. "It's just something that happened because we were really drunk and a little stupid and that's life, sometimes."

"I know," he said. "It's just, I liked you. I _like_ you." He frowned, and there was something defeated and sad about his expression now. "But we messed something up last night."

"Yeah," she said quietly, watching him. Steve shifted his grip, staring out into the city, lit up in neon and gaudily flickering colors, the hum of crowded sidewalks beneath them. She knew that Tony Stark loved Vegas - he had held forth on the subject with some eloquence and a few highly illustrative gestures last night - and she wondered abruptly what a man like Steve Rogers saw in this city and its oversize attitude. He wasn't ill at ease in Vegas, but he didn't fit in either, with his t-shirt tucked neatly away and blonde hair falling into his eyes.

She slid over a couple inches into his personal space, so that their shoulders almost touched. "...So you're into me, huh?" She bumped into him companionably, and raised her eyebrows when he looked down at her curiously.

"No, Mrs. Rogers, I wouldn't say that at all." His voice was bone dry, and it took her a moment to react to the tone, because that was some serious sarcasm aimed her way from _this man_ of all people, and that kind of thing took a little getting used to.

"Ooh, feisty. I like it."

He snorted, sounding a little calmer, and his shoulder pressed warmly into her own as they stood together, forearms propped up on the black metal railing. He glanced down at her again, sideways, and she realized his eyes were sliding down to the lower curve of her back.

He angled his body toward her then, and her pulse started to beat a little faster, because fuck, she really did like his stupid face _a lot_. The fact that he remembered what apparently were some epic makeouts while she had mostly vague memories of doing shots and throwing up on his shoes made the whole situation ridiculously lopsided and pretty much demanded she throw him up against a nearby wall to even the playing field.

She squeezed her hand into a fist, her fingernails digging into the flesh of her palm.

"I think I should go," she forced herself to say, hating it even as she said the words. She reminded herself of their adult high-five earlier and that the only way to make this situation even more awkward was by doing the one thing they'd apparently not been able to accomplish last night in their high speed attempt to fit an entire relationship into a single desperate evening.

She hoped it wasn't just her imagination that he looked a little disappointed. "Okay," he said.

She took a step back from the edge of the balcony. "I'll just... I'll talk to you tomorrow, yeah?"

He took a step toward her, eating up the space she'd so carefully put between them, and stuck out his hand. She stared at it dumbly until she remembered, oh yeah, this was the rockstar move she'd come up with this morning.

She took hold of his hand and shook it firmly.

"Goodnight, Darcy Lewis," he said.

She smiled, just a little. "Goodnight yourself, Cap."


	3. Chapter 3

At 7:32 AM on a Tuesday, a unexpectedly diligent research intern managed to connect one of the clearer photographs of Steve Rogers and his mystery Vegas girl with the publicly released information about Jane Foster's research team, including a few officially sanctioned photographs intended for press releases.  The story broke on E! and spread like wildfire through the media.

At 7:59 AM, her name started to trend on Twitter.

\---

"So this is what we planned for," Pepper said.  Darcy painted her toenails one-handed, phone smashed up against her ear and her tongue caught between her teeth as she dabbed the excess polish off the brush.  "We'll be sending out the press release that you saw yesterday, Darcy, approximately five minutes from now."

"Got it," Darcy said briskly, and wiped a neat, straight line down the side of her big toe with a bit of kleenex.  The nail polish was a pale baby yellow, the color of sundresses and easter eggs.

"Yes, ma'am," Steve said, his voice muted by the phone, and Darcy smiled absently at her toes.

"We're getting there, I promise," Pepper said.  "Just hang in there."

"No sweat," Darcy said.  She squinted thoughtfully at her toes.  White polka dots might be the way to go once the base coat set.

After the call ended, she did several laps around the room, wiggling her toes in a futile attempt to speed up the drying process, and collapsed dramatically onto her mattress with a large-scale flop.  The mattress bounced gently underneath her once or twice, cradling her momentum and absorbing the shock, leaving Darcy lying face down on a placid surface, suspended and motionless.

\---

"Jaaaaane," she whined. "I am soooo booooored."

"Gee, I never would have guessed."

Darcy switched the phone to her other ear and and twisted, trying to catch a good angle of her back in the bathroom mirror. She had stripped down to her bra, with the band of her rocket ship pajama pants rolled over twice, tugged down low on her hips so that the shield sat like a beacon smack dab in the center of her lower back. It was inked in a thick line of black and filled in with solid blocks of primary color. It was starting to look a little worn around the edges from surviving multiple showers, but it was still surprisingly bright.

She hadn't told Jane, or anybody else, about it.

"Yeah. I'm sorry I keep calling you - and you've been an absolute saint - but now you're leaving tomorrow morning and I guess the dark, horrible reality of that is starting to sink in."

Jane laughed, softly, and Darcy wrapped an arm behind her back, tracing the unseen edge of the top of the circular shield with one of her fingers. "Sorry, Darce."

"I know, I know. Science waits for no woman."

"It does not. But you're right, I should have planned my work trip to Stark Expo around the assumption that you would end up married to Captain America after meeting him for the first time and need to go into hiding while that gets sorted out. What was I thinking?"

"Good question. Sounds reasonable to me."

"Obviously."

"Call your parents," Jane said briskly. "Watch a movie, read a book, marathon a TV show, do a bunch of jumping jacks, make a website for something, work on your resume, apply to more jobs, catch up on your emails."

"Done, done, done, done twice, not going to do jumping jacks, no, done, done, done. I also started this pushup program that I read about online - I have an alarm on my phone that goes off every hour now and I stop whatever I'm doing and do three pushups. I'm pretty sure my arms already look more like Michelle Obama's."

She rotated to face herself in the mirror, and bought herself a front row ticket to the gun show. Then she frowned, and put her phone into speaker mode so she could take a photo. Before and after pictures were definitely the way to go here. 

"Look," Jane said, "I have to go to some meet and greet thing that Tony's making me attend, but I'll see you tonight, okay? I'll bring over pizza, and maybe Thor, if I can find him."

"Pepperoni _and_ my favorite Norse god? Jane Foster, you might just be the best thing ever."

"Later, Darce," Jane said warmly, leaving Darcy alone in her bathroom, staring at a shield drawn in permanent marker on her back.

\---

The fisheye lens turned Steve into a caricature of himself, all pointy nose and blocky jaw with swept-back blonde hair and shoulders narrowing down to a comically small waist. Darcy paused a moment before undoing the chain lock and turning the handle. She had stopped by his hotel room a couple times, but Steve had never ventured down from his suite on high - probably, Darcy assumed, out of an old-fashioned sense of propriety, coupled with a healthy dose of very reasonable my-what-a-weird-situation-we've-found-ourselves-in awkwardness.

"Hey - what's up, Cap?"

He shoved his hands into the pockets of his slacks like a six year old, and rocked back on his heels in the hallway.  "You tased Thor?" he asked mildly, out of nowhere, raising a single interrogative eyebrow. Darcy hid a smile.

"Uh, if you mean did I righteously defend myself when some threatening, muscle-bound Adonis showed up in the middle of nowhere and freaked me the fuck out - you better believe I did."

The corner of Steve's mouth twitched.  

"Also," she added, feeling just a tiny bit smug, "I hit him with a car too.  Want to come in?"

"Only if you promise not to tase me," he said, and put his hands up in a show of innocence that really only resulted in some awesomely flexed biceps, because that was fair of the universe.  "Or run me over."

"I make no promises," she said, and opened the door wider.

Her hotel room seemed even tinier with Steve looming inside, obviously at a loss for what to do with himself and looking like he wanted to duck his head down from the ceiling despite the fact that there was more than enough clearance.  She waved him grandly over to the two chairs, with straight wooden backs and upholstered in a heavy-duty plaid, next to her tiny dollhouse-sized coffee table.

"So what's up?" she said, and tucked her feet up underneath her.

"I came here... I wanted to see how you were doing. With what happened this morning."

"Oh, you know.  I'm trying not to let the sudden fame go to my head - staying grounded, hanging with my homies, being all Darcy from the block."

He nodded.  He was wearing a collared plaid shirt with his hair slicked neatly back, and it occurred to her then that he had probably dressed nicely to come talk to her.

She cleared her throat.  "Um, seriously though.  I'm doing okay. Bored as all get-out, but okay."

"It's strange," he said quietly.  "I understand that.  I remember when I... when I became Captain America."

"I'm sure that was a whole special rainbow of strange.  I'm only the assumed-girlfriend of Captain America.  People are going to forget about me faster than you think - out of sight, out of mind.  Anyway, Pepper has this entire thing covered with a frightening level of efficiency.  It's really not that bad."

"Are you sure?"

"Yeah." She shrugged. "Besides, it's kind of cool to have been a trending topic on Twitter.  I'm going to kill at two truths and a lie from here on out."

"...Is that what it sounds like?"

"Uh, yup.  Pretty much - it's a game where you tell somebody two things that are true about yourself, and one that isn't, and then the other person tries to guess which one is the lie.  It's an icebreaker kind of thing.  So I might say that my three things are... I've hit the God of Thunder with a family sized science-van, I've been a trending topic on Twitter, and I like pickles.  One of those statements is a lie."

"You don't like _pickles_?"  Steve looked aghast at this shocking piece of information.

"Eww, no.  They taste like sour in my mouth."

He gave her an _are-you-broken-inside_ look, and Darcy bit back on the sudden, giddy urge to laugh.

"And what about you, wonder boy?  What are your two truths and a lie?"

"Let's see."  He tipped back his chair, and floated a foot up when he hit the balancing point.  "I love pickles, I've punched Hitler, and I've never been called wonder boy before."

"Well, the pickles thing is obvious, considering the stink-eye you just gave me.  And since punching Hitler in the face is basically your penultimate reason for existing... I guess wonder boy?"

"You _do_ remember meeting Tony, right?"

She slugged him cheerfully in the shoulder before remembering the whole stupid muscles-like-iron thing Steve had going on.  "Yes, _you_ , I totally remember that part.  Wait, does that mean you've never punched Hitler?  Oh my god, either I've been lied to all my life or you actually hate pickles."

"I've never punched Hitler," he said solemnly.  "I fake-punched a whole lineup of fake-Hitlers, but I never saw him in real life."

"Blasphemy!" she gasped theatrically.

Steve's good natured expression darkened, and she saw him clench a fist, the bone of his knuckle standing out suddenly white.  "If I had ever met him in person, I'd have done more than just punch him."

Oh.  "And that's why you're an American hero," she said finally, softly, and he glanced over at her, the color high on his cheeks.  

She traced the curve of the coffee table with her finger, running the glossed edge of the wood under her fingertip.  "So... ah, have you ever punched Thor?  Please tell me you've punched Thor at least.  Restore my faith in _something_."

He shifted a little, knees stuffed underneath the low profile of the coffee table, which was failing a little harder every minute at being a functional piece of furniture.  "Are you trying to ask which one of us would win in a fist fight?" he asked, with an obvious attempt at good humor.

"Sure.  Bare-knuckle brawl, epic bar fight, you and the God of Thunder - who reigns supreme?"

"Thor," he said seriously.  "I don't know what you think I am, but it's not that.  If I get to have my shield, though," he continued thoughtfully, "that might even things out a little."

"Does that mean Thor gets to have his..."  She mimed hammering a nail into a two-by-four.

"You're the one laying down the ground rules."

"I suppose I have to say yes to the cosmic hammer then, if you get the shield.  Sorry, man."

"That's fair.  And yes, I have punched Thor, but only by accident."

"Okay, I don't even understand how you accidentally punch somebody."

"Training," he said succinctly.

"And that's reason number twelve hundred and one that I'm not a superhero.  ...Superheroine.  Wait a second."  She narrowed her eyes.  "Let's back way up here.  Who told you about me tasing Thor anyway?  Was it Jane?"

Steve shifted a little in his seat.  "Actually, it was Thor."

She narrowed her eyes even more, squinting suspiciously for all she was worth.  "Does Thor know about...?"

"He doesn't know about the.. the wedding, no."  Steve's eyes floated up from her face to examine a particularly fascinating section of ceiling.  "He merely wanted to, ah, inform me of your many good traits.  I think he thought he was being quite subtle."

"...Are you saying that Thor was trying to _wingman_ me?"

"Maybe?"

"Oh, Christ."  She let her head fall into her hands.  "I don't know whether that makes my life the best or the worst."

"The best?" Steve offered cautiously.

She cracked a smile and looked back up at him.  "Always the optimist, huh."

"Just trying to be helpful, ma'am," he said - rather cheekily, she thought.

"Alright.  So what else did the Almighty Thor say about me?  I guess I'm kind of interested in what he thinks my good points as a potential mate are."

"The tasing was mentioned several times."

"Okay, well, that's not surprising.  The man has a hard-on for people who can take him down."

"Oh.  Did Dr. Foster ever...?"

"Um, kind of?  She also hit him with the van - it was basically a vehicular free-for-all for a while there.  More than that, though, Jane is wicked smart.  She could take him out with nothing but her _mind_ , and Thor totally knows it."  She pointed a finger at her own temple in demonstration of the serious power of Jane's smarts.

"He also mentioned, ah, several things I think I shouldn't share."  A thin blush blossomed on his cheeks, staining them red like he was in some sort of Rockwell painting and had just stolen an apple pie or put a frog in the teacher's desk or something equally wholesome.

"...Was it about my boobs?  Because I've got to imagine that's a selling point."

"He thinks of you as a sister," Steve protested weakly, and that was a _yes there was definitely discussion of your tits_ if Darcy had ever heard one.  She got it.  Her breasts were pretty awesome.

"That's cool, because I think of him as the older brother I never had, who I like to occasionally ogle and is totally doing my boss lady/best friend.  It's your classic sibling relationship."

Steve manfully ignored this.  "He really does care for you very much."

"He's a good guy," she said, trying not to sound as over-the-top fond of the dude as she was.

"He is."

He fell silent for a moment after that, fidgeting in a way she already found very un-Steve-like, scuffing a foot distractedly on the carpet.  He was staring somewhere in the vicinity of her left knee, lips pursed together.

"So I really came here..."  He stopped and cleared his throat, trying again.  "I'm tired of being cooped up."

"Ugh, YES, me too.  I'm about to go crazy.  I braided and unbraided my hair like eight times today, because I couldn't think of anything better to do.  I think Jane's about ready to throw her phone under a bus to avoid me.  Being under house arrest sucks the major suck."

"It does."

She leaned forward and quirked an eyebrow.  "So do you have a plan, Cool Hand Luke?"

"I've always wanted to see the Grand Canyon," he said.

She froze, staring at him.

"You... are you suggesting we, what, sneak out of here?  And go to the _Grand Canyon_?"

He nodded.

"How do we even get there?"

"My motorcycle."

"Your..."  She snapped her mouth shut.

"It's okay if you don't want to," he said earnestly, interpreting her silence as rejection.  "But I need to _do_ something.  And I thought that, since we're both in the same situation, that maybe you might want to..."

"Yes," she said quickly.  "Yes, I do..." she realized with a sudden panic she couldn't end the sentence there and hastily tacked on, "...want to.  Go with you."  She wondered, a little dizzily, if this counted as their second date, if you categorized the whole marriage-proposal-acceptance thing as the worst first date idea in the history of ever.

A small smile tucked itself into the corner of his mouth, showing the faintest of dimples, and she pressed her fingernails into the palm of her hand.  "Okay," he said.

She drew in a deep breath.  "...I can't believe you've never seen the Grand Canyon.  It's, like, un-American.  I mean, you're basically the person equivalent of the Grand Canyon; how have you never seen it?"

"Have you been there before?"

"Once, when I was a kid.  The Lewis family has a proud and noble heritage of cross-country RVing."

"Okay," Steve agreed, with a polite blankness she was beginning to realize he deployed when he didn't feel like asking for clarification on every single reference past the 1940s that he didn't understand, and then his face softened.  "I've always wanted to see it," he said, in a quieter tone.

"Spoiler alert: it's awesome."

"I'm going to hold you to that."

She propped her chin up on her fist thoughtfully.  "So how are we going to pull this off?  Without, you know, being harassed the whole time?"

"We can leave early - I was thinking oh-six hundred hours.  And we'll be on the road most of the day, which will help.  We should stay away from people."

"I think we need disguises," she said, because she was nothing if not totally brilliant.  "Jane has a wig I could borrow."

"I have sunglasses," he said, helpfully.

She grinned at him like the Cheshire Cat.  "You're brilliant," she said.  "This is absolutely brilliant.  And you're kind of a rebel.  I like it." She grabbed for her phone, sitting on its charger at the base of the TV. She had to tip two legs of her chair off the ground to make it. She swiped it open and texted _can you bring the pink wig tonight?_ to Jane.

She was pretty sure this was not the right thing to be doing, galavanting off with a genetically engineered supersoldier she'd accidentally married four days before, where the annulment process featured such things as actual strategy conference calls and a carefully orchestrated PR campaign.  Jane would kill her if she knew about this.  Pepper would probably unleash the full power of an unbridled Tony Stark on both of them.  She could barely be in the same general area as Steve without wanting to jump his bones in weird, increasingly possessive ways.  None of this was going to end well.

"Jane's wig is pink," she said, instead.  "It's a Halloween thing, but she brought it here for some sort of Stark Expo after-hours scientist costume party deal."

He nodded slowly, like he wasn't quite sure what he was agreeing to.  "I'm sure it's swell," he said, and to his credit it didn't even sound like a question.

"Heck yes it is."

"Is she going to notice you're gone tomorrow?"

"Who, Jane?  She's hitching a flight back to New York tomorrow morning, so as long as I have my phone on me, the answer to that is no."

Her phone beeped:

_sure, what for?_

_reasons_ , she texted back. 

He pursed his lips. "We'll need to bring food with us tomorrow. I think we should split the order through room service. We can pack up the mini-bars too."

"Oh man, you have a mini-bar? That must be nice, living how the other half lives."

"Oh," he said, looking a little embarrassed. "SHIELD always books me into rooms that have one. I guess I assumed they were a normal thing, now." He gestured toward the lime-green mini-fridge taking up valuable floor space against the wall next to her TV stand.

"Sorry to burst your living-in-the-future bubble, dude, that's just a sad, empty fridge."

"Okay, then, so I'll pack up my mini-bar to share and we'll come up with our room service orders tonight."

"Sounds like a plan," she said, trying to bite back on the massive grin spilling over onto her face.

They shook hands as he left, like co-conspirators, and because apparently that was the thing they did now. Darcy was starting to think that going for the high-five option really would have been the awesomer choice.

\---

She went to Google News, did a search for his name, and ordered the results by date.

The top story not about the Vegas fiasco was a PR piece about Captain America visiting a children's hospital in New Jersey.  It was a short human-interest write up with a few quotes from parents and one from Steve, talking about being sick as a kid (in the _Great Depression_ , a small voice in her head chimed in, before she pushed it down ruthlessly).  There was an attached photograph of Steve, decked out in all the Captain America trappings, crouched down next to a skinny girl with wide, dark eyes and a handkerchief around her head.  Both of them were staring solemnly at the camera.

The second article was about the continued clean-up from the giant mechanical squid that had attacked San Francisco, because that was the world they lived in now - aliens attacking New York from a wormhole in the sky and mechanical sea creatures trying to take out the Bay Bridge.  She clicked over to YouTube, and brought up some shaky cell phone footage of that day.  She'd seen it all before - video of the attack had been replayed obsessively on the 24-hour news channels for weeks afterwards - but she'd always watched for Thor, zipping through the air, a small streak of red in the sky.

This time, she watched two small figures running out to the middle of the bridge, one in black and the other carrying the Captain America shield.  They were tiny against the vast span of the bridge, and even though she knew what was coming, she bit her lip as they paused for a moment at the center, preparing something, then jumped over the railing together, limbs flailing as they fell toward the surface of the water.

She googled her own name.

The image results were mostly variations of her night out with Steve, with a few publicity stills of the work she'd done with Jane and SHIELD last summer sprinkled in for good measure and a pretty spectacularly bad headshot from her college's online directory.

She was beginning to group together the Vegas pictures into several distinct cameras/scenarios:

There were a few fuzzy shots of the two of them walking through an as-yet unidentified casino, lost in each other in a way that was obvious to see even in the crappy quality cell phone photos, his hand curled around her hip.

There was a cluster of photographs of them in the booth of some dark bar, sharing a side, his arm kicked back around her shoulders and a goofy-happy smile on his face as she jabbed a finger at some imaginary topic in front of them.

There was one of them...

She closed the screen to her laptop, her heart beating fast and a heated flush working its way up her body.  Goosebumps chased up her arms, and she pulled the sweater she wore closer in around herself, stretching the sleeves.  She took a deep breath in through her nose, told herself that she was an adult and this was ridiculous, and opened the laptop back up again, slowly.

They were standing against a brick wall, kissing in a way she could only describe as intimate.  Steve was slumped down to her height and she was standing on her toes, her hand wound up in the hair at the back of his neck.  Both of their eyes were closed.  There was an expression of... of _something_ on Steve's face she found hard to look at, some sort of intense emotion breaking through the surface, like razor thin lines of sunlight through the edges of a curtain.  There was a _focus_ there she couldn't reconcile, couldn't remember.

His arm was hooked around her waist, and his hand was spread possessively over the flat of her back, a place where she knew the shield was now and was willing to bet it had been when the photograph was taken, drawn on her skin.

She had her right hand placed flat on his chest, and she could see, just barely, in the distorted colors of the photo, a glimmer of something gold on her finger.

She shut the tab and stared blankly at her keyboard.

\---

He was waiting for her in the parking garage the next morning, kicked back against an old-fashioned looking motorcycle with wide handlebars and an upright stance.  He was staring, unfocused, at the plain concrete wall in front of him, sporting aviators and a brown leather bomber jacket and looking impossibly good for 6 AM in the morning.

She wondered if he'd seen the same photo she had.  She hadn't seen a laptop in his hotel room, and Steve was pretty much the textbook definition of low-tech, but the man worked for SHIELD - for all she knew, the bottom of his shoe had the ability to pull some Get Smart shit and turn into an iPad or something.

It was much more likely that he didn't go poking through the media for information about his own life.  It wasn't his style.

She took a deep breath (in through her nose, out through her mouth) before continuing on, walking briskly up to him like she hadn't just been lurking around the corner and watching him like a total creeper.

"Way to be incognito, dude," she said, and reached up to straighten her shoulder-length wig, ironed straight and a shade of electric pink that put the entire decade of the 1980s to shame.  "I think all you've done is make yourself look even more Captain America-y."

He stared at her, and she grinned.  "Like it?  It took me forever to pin my hair up underneath."

He cleared his throat.  "It looks nice," he said, his voice a little tight.  He looked down, away from her.

She frowned, and dug out a pair of thick, white-rimmed sunglasses from her purse. 

"Let's trade," she said, and reached up - and _up_ \- to pull the aviators off his face, peeling off a layer of unapproachable male and revealing a blinking, slightly confused Steve underneath.

He gestured at the white sunglasses, which she now noticed with a vague sense of guilty amusement had a single fake rhinestone embedded in each arm next to the brand name.  "You want me to wear those?"

She slipped his aviators on and gave him her best we-are-not-amused look.  "Are we or are we not in disguise?"

"...We are."

"Then yeah.  These," she pointed to the sleek retro sunglasses now on her own face, " _scream_ Captain America.  Aren't these just your normal sunglasses, anyway?"

"They hide my face," he protested.

"C'mon," she cajoled.  "It'll be fun.  Epic adventure, goofy disguises, what could be better than that?"

He twisted up his mouth like he wanted to argue with her more, but he put the white-rimmed sunglasses on.

"I look ridiculous," he muttered.

"Actually," she said slowly, "you don't."  He looked different - his jaw looked about 25% less sharp next to a pair of glittery plastic gems - but on the whole he looked... well, _good_.  The white frame contrasted with the battered leather jacket and white t-shirt he wore and broke up some of Steve's untouchable 1940s movie star aura, like he was maybe just some hot, self-absorbed guy in his 20s who dressed slightly to the right of the line when it came to ironic fashion.  "You really don't."

"Thanks," he said flatly.

"No, I mean it.  You look kind of..." hot, modern, my age, "...like you should be in Kanye West's entourage or something."

"Let's skip to the part where I don't understand what that means and start there."

"It means you're pulling it off."

"Hmm."  Steve sounded highly skeptical of the situation, but he turned to fiddle with the bike as she grabbed the helmet off the seat, wondering how she was going to manage the whole helmet-and-wig arrangement.  She pocketed his sunglasses and settled for shoving the thing on her head and sorting out the damage later.  The helmet surrounded her in a thick plastic bubble, and felt heavy when she ducked her head up and down, like she was the coolest bobblehead ever, or maybe an astronaut.

"Where's your helmet?" she asked.

"You're wearing it," he said distractedly, running his hands over the line of the bike, his fingertips moving gently over the paint job like he was reading braille.  She could see the tendons fanned out on the back of his hand, and the muscles in his forearm as they shifted, his fingers flexing as they skimmed over the metal.

"Um.  Isn't that dangerous?  And doesn't Captain America without a helmet on make you, like, a bad role model?"

"I don't actually need a helmet.  I've taken on worse than a road before."

"Okay, but what about the _kids_?  Also, the fact that you can utter that sentence about your life is kind of horrifying."

He straightened back up and smiled at her.  "...Are we or are we not in disguise?"

"Fine," she said.  "Be reckless.  You should just know that I'm pro-helmet, pro-condom, and pro-flossing.  I'm a safety girl."

He turned away from her again and muttered, so low she almost couldn't make it out, "I am reckless."  He swung his leg over the bike, turning the key and revving the engine.  It echoed like thunder in the empty, early-morning parking garage.

She clambered up behind him, and faced that awkward moment when you decide what to do with your hands and body on the back of your husband/casual acquaintance/dude frozen in time and from literally several generations ago/superhero friend's motorcycle.  She settled for a few inches of space between them and her hands on his hips, clutching at the thick, double-sewn hem of his leather jacket.

She knew that if she walked her fingers over and skimmed them up underneath the fabric, she'd find her own writing and a very in-your-face claim of ownership.  She squeezed the fabric a little tighter in her fist.

"Ready?" Steve yelled back over his shoulder.

"You better believe it," she said, and held on tight.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey look, a new chapter! Thanks, as always, to [51stcenturyfox](http://51stcenturyfox.livejournal.com/) for gently reminding me to keep working on this story and being the best of the beta readers. <3

She gave up on the appropriate distance thing pretty fast.

Here's the thing: it was _cold_. She wasn't latched onto Steve's torso like a barnacle out of sexual frustration - this was survival, pure and simple. She had her arms slipped up under his leather bomber jacket and her thighs wedged up firmly against the back of his, and she could feel the heat that soaked back into her even through the layers of clothing. He was functioning as a living, breathing, heated windshield for her.

She was pretty sure sharing body heat was one of the things you vowed to do when you got married, anyway, right? In sickness or health, in the tropics or in the freezing fucking cold when strapped to the back of your pseudo-husband's motorcycle. It seemed reasonable.

They traveled through a flat, dull brown landscape, weaving through the flat-topped mesas dotted with wiry, angry little shrubs and the faded golden of dead desert grasses. The sun was rising slowly in front of them, wavering indecisively as it hovered over the asphalt. Steve's motorcycle was loud in the still morning, scaring small desert animals off the side of the road and echoing off the rocky hills.

She turned her cheek to lay the helmet flat against his shoulders and tightened her arms around his waist.

\---

They reached the canyon a little after noon.

It was as epic as her younger self remembered, appropriately grand and spilling out to encompass everything they could see from their perch at the thin edge. She pulled her hands up into the sleeves of her jacket, shaking the pink wig back out of her eyes. Steve was staring moodily off into the distance next to her, framed against the horizon like some over-the-top arrangement of American iconography. The only thing missing was a bald eagle flying around his head and maybe a cowboy sitting in front of him, smoking a cigarette with his hat tipped back.

"Hey," she said.

"Hi," he said, and the smallest flicker of a smile appeared on his face as he looked down at her.

They were standing on a lip overhanging the canyon. There were a few stone spires, flat-topped, arrayed out in front of them like stepping stones, growing up from the canyon wall as it sloped down to the thin silver river she could see at the bottom. About a hundred yards away, a large group of tourists were milling aimlessly around the general vicinity of a tour bus. She could hear the faint white noise of muted conversation and the occasional shriek of playing kids.

"Alright, photo op. We need to get a picture of this whole mystical convergence of America thing that's happening." She pulled out her phone and opened up the camera app. "Say cheese, Cap."

He smiled, eyes still solemn, and she wondered how science could make somebody so ridiculously photogenic. She backed up, holding her iPhone out sideways in front of her, trying to find a good shot.

"Could you back up a little? It's kind of hard to get you and the canyon in the same photo when it's underneath you."

He glanced back behind him at the edge of the overhang. "You know, I think I have a better idea," he said, and without any other warning turned and ran full-speed off the cliff.

Time slowed down like a scene from a bad action movie as he jumped, and her scream stuck in her throat as his long legs windmilled in the empty air underneath him. If the situation had been comical in any way, she would have laughed at how accurate the Road Runner cartoons apparently were, but _fuck_. Oh fuck.

He landed, buckling a little at the knees, and time sped up to normal again. His upper body pitched forward but he stayed centered neatly over his feet, arms stretched out to either side like a gymnast, balanced in the middle of one of the flat-topped stone spires dotting out from the edge of the canyon. It was a graceful display of sheer and utter athleticism.

Darcy's stomach started to slowly crawl it's way up out of her toes where it had hidden in sheer terror, and she took a deep breath in.

He pivoted, lowering his arms, and smiled broadly at her. "Better?" he asked mildly, and if he'd been within arm's reach she would have smacked him.

"Oh my god, what are you trying to do, give me a heart attack? Dude. Give a little warning next time."

His smile slipped a little.

She shook her head. "Sorry. Sorry. It's just..." she took another breath, "I guess I forgot you were a superhero for a second. And that you can do crazy superhero things. Like, uh, that."

"Oh," he said, and to her surprise his smile widened again.

"But it's cool! Totally cool. Just, you know, took me by surprise."

"Most people don't forget that I'm Captain America," he said, sounding weirdly pleased.

"Uh, well, you're welcome for freaking out on you, then? And this is going to be the best photo ever now, so that's at least awesome." She walked back up to the edge of the cliff and held her phone above her head, angling it downward to show the scope of the canyon behind him, the strata of rock curving off into the distance and disappearing at his feet. He raised an eyebrow as she took the picture, and it was a canny and not-very-Captain America expression. She supposed it was a Steve look.

"So," she said when she was done, "how exactly are you planning to get back over to civilization?"

"Same way I got here."

"Sweet," she said, and stepped back out of the way.

\---

She had stripped the flat sheet off her bed that morning, so they spread it out on their little outshoot of the canyon wall as the tourists in the distance loaded themselves back onto the tour bus. She chopped up a Snickers bar into hors d'oeuvres size chunks, laying them out on their side like sushi, while he unpacked the rest of the small containers of food they had stashed away from room service the previous night.

"So," she said, loading up a paper plate with a painter's palette worth of mismatched food, "before science made you all buff and an action hero, could you have made that jump? You know, if it wasn't as far?"

"No," he said absently, putting the finishing touches on a pretty epic looking sandwich. "I wasn't clumsy, but I wasn't very coordinated as a kid either."

She looked up as he took a bite. "Seriously?"

He shook his head no, mouth stuffed full of cold pulled pork.

"Okay, so how does that work? Did you get training after the whole," she was running out of ways to reference this _event_ in his past that there was really no good word for, "Captain America-ing?"

He swallowed and took a swig from their water bottle. "Some. I was told I might take a while to adjust, afterwards - that I would be taller, and I wouldn't know how much force to use when doing simple things. But it didn't, really. It was - it was like this body came with the memory of how it works. I just _knew_."

"Weird," she said, then decided that sounded like she was saying he was creepy, and amended it with an "...and totally interesting."

"You can say weird."

"Weird, then. Absolutely weird. The weirdest."

"Thanks," he said dryly.

"You asked for it," she said, and swiped a salt and vinegar potato chip from his plate. "So that's part of the whole can't-get-drunk-the-normal-way thing too, right? Does your body turn anything you put in it directly into muscle mass or something?"

He looked down at himself, and it was the strangest look she'd ever seen - there was an odd, contemplative distance in how he examined his own body. "It's my metabolism." He licked his lips. "It's efficient."

"I get the feeling that's an understatement."

"It's _very_ efficient," he amended, with the faintest trace of a smile. "Most of the time that's helpful. Sometimes it's not."

"Yeah, I suppose I can see that. I'm sure it's not pleasant drinking whatever Tony came up with just to get a buzz on."

"It tastes vile," he said. "But I..." Steve shifted on their makeshift picnic blanket, "ah, I," he tried again before stopping, obviously at a loss for words.

She raised an eyebrow. "Everybody wants to get their groove thing on sometimes," she said, carefully.

"It's not..." He picked at the crust of his sandwich fretfully, scattering a few crumbs on the sheet nearby. "I just thought it seemed... normal. The good type of normal."

"Making an epic mistake in Vegas is an American tradition, so well done you."

He lay back, tucking his hands behind his head and stretched his legs out, and hello, there was a whole lot of man happening in front of her. "But it _was_ a mistake," he said slowly.

She decided that two could play at the whole lounging attractively on the blanket game. She curled up on her side next to him, propping her head up on the palm of her hand, and gave the half-eaten sandwich lying next to Steve's prone figure a serious once-over before nabbing it.

"Sure, it was a mistake," she said, taking a large, appreciative bite of the cold pork. "But it's also the reason we're having a picnic on the edge of the Grand Canyon right now, so maybe life has a way of working shit like that out. You're a good person. And you own a kick ass motorcycle. Don't underestimate things."

He turned to look at her, blonde hair scattered every which way around his head, and she resisted the urge to comb the spiky bits back with her fingers.

"I can see why Jane wants to keep you," he said finally.

She shrugged. "Who wouldn't?"

He smiled widely, eyes trained on the sky and his hands wrapped behind his head. He looked even more ridiculously built than normal like that, his shoulders busting out of his t-shirt and his torso tapering down to a waist that was pretty much a caricature of masculinity.

"Are you going to?" he asked.

"Uh, going to what?"

"Continue working with Jane. Work for SHIELD."

She flipped a baby carrot contemplatively, letting it play through her fingers. "I don't know." 

"You'd be good at it," Steve offered.

"Maybe. Probably. But," she frowned. "...I just don't know. It's hard to explain."

"Try me."

She shoved half-heartedly at his shoulder. "When did you get so pushy?"

"Since right now."

"Um, okay," she said. "So it's like... I love working with Jane. And what she's doing is astronomically important, like, off the scales awesome. But me, I mostly do things like handle the paperwork and make sure coffee gets made in the morning. Which is totally fine, don't get me wrong, but sometimes I think I'd like to do something... I don't know. Different."

He nodded.

"I don't know how to turn down a job like working for _SHIELD_ , though. Sometimes I think I must be out of my mind to even consider turning it down. And sometimes I wish I could have a job that actually used some of the stuff I've spent the last six years learning. So I'm stuck in this weird jobless after-graduation rut, waiting for the right answer to drop into my lap." She glanced over at Steve. "This must sound awfully new age-y to you."

"Why?"

"You're part of the Greatest Generation. Aren't you supposed to tell me to nut up and deal with it? Get a job and be grateful for it?"

"Do you want me to?"

She grinned. "Um, _yes_. That would be weirdly awesome."

He propped himself up on an elbow and looked sternly down his nose at her. "Miss Lewis," he started solemnly.

"I like this already."

He arched an eyebrow, continuing on like the total pro that he was. "Miss Lewis, stop being a layabout and get a damned job."

"Oh my god, that was awesome. Hold that thought," she said, and patted around for her phone behind her. "I've got to get a video of this."

"Really?"

"Definitely. This is _gold_." She opened her phone and flipped it over to video. "You're on, soldier."

He repeated himself, staring steadily into the pinpoint lens of her phone, and she could see the media training he'd had in the way he held himself on camera. What could she say, the man gave good eye contact.

"You're not going to show that to anybody else, are you?" he asked, watching as she saved the video with a cheerful flourish.

"Nah," she said. "I think this falls under the whole can't-testify-against-your-spouse area of legality. Your secret is safe with me."

"And what secret is that?"

"Uh, that you're kind of a goofball?"

He lay back again, a smile playing around his lips.

"So, speaking of jobs," she said, "how exactly does yours work anyway? I mean... so you're a superhero. Is that, like, a 9-5 thing? With overtime for saving the world?"

"I'm more of a... free agent," he said slowly. "For the most part. I live on my own, and I go where I want to go."

"Sounds good."

"Sometimes." He shifted on the blanket. "SHIELD can find me anywhere on the planet, though, so they can bring back me in on a situation if they need to."

"Aaaand that's a bit more creepy." She looked suspiciously up at the sky above them, brilliantly blue and free of clouds. "So, right now, some SHIELD lackey somewhere is keeping tabs on you?"

"Not exactly. I carry a beacon that they can activate."

"Still creepster. Wait. Does that mean SHIELD knows we're playing hooky right now?"

"No," he said firmly.

"Uh, how can you be sure?"

"I can't."

"But..."

"They know what my reaction would be if I ever found out they were doing something like that." Steve's lips tightened, and he stubbornly stuck out his jaw a bit, looking impossibly heroic as he gazed off into the distance.

"Fair enough," she said. She supposed it didn't pay to get on the bad side of Captain America. That was a publicity war you were going to lose, every time. "Okay. So it's part-time gig, kind of. In a way. And the rest of the time you just... bum around?"

"Not exactly," Steve said, "but that's a little bit correct."

"Do people recognize you?"

"In general?"

"Yeah. Like, if you walk into a bar, do you get jumped by the hot waitress? Or by kids wanting your autograph or something?"

"Sometimes. Not as much as you might think. The sunglasses help."

"So does that mean you _have_ been jumped by a hot waitress?" she asked, and cheerfully poked him in the arm.

Steve shifted a little, and it was like she was personally witnessing a battle between gentlemanly discretion and personal honesty. "A couple times," he admitted finally.

"Steve, my man, I'm kind of proud of you."

He shook his head, tucking his chin down and hiding what she was pretty sure was a smile.

"But say no more. You're a gentleman, and I'm your secret Vegas-wife-slash-soon-to-be-divorcee. Sometimes discretion is the better part of valor."

"That's very thoughtful of you," he said.

She rolled over onto her stomach, feeling the rays of the sun warm the fabric on her back. "It's been such a gorgeous day," she said. "Thank you for inviting me along with you, Steve. Seriously."

He was silent for so long she thought he'd forgotten what she'd said, or maybe fallen asleep, stretched out on his back next to her.

"Thank you for coming with me," he said finally, and his voice was quiet.

"Mmhmm," she said, and closed her eyes.

\---

"You can't be here," she heard a voice say, distantly.

Darcy opened her eyes, squinting into the bright light of the day and blinking rapidly. The man who had spoken was looming over them, silhouetted in black, and appeared to be wearing some sort of brimmed hat. She nudged Steve's shoulder.

"Steve," she muttered thickly, "somebody's here." Her skin was damp with sweat and pink with the beginning of a sunburn.

"I'm going to have to ask you to move," the voice repeated.

She pulled herself to her feet, feeling light-headed and wobbly. Next to her, Steve was already standing and appeared to have the soldier thing where he had the ability to go from sleeping to functioning in milliseconds.

"Is there a problem?" Steve asked, way too alertly.

"Can't be over here," the man explained shortly, and she realized then that the wide-brimmed hat he was wearing was from the park service. "There's a designated picnic area over there." He pointed in the direction that the tour bus had been parked. 

"We'll move," she said, rubbing at her eyes. "It's fine, we'll move, just give us a minute."

The ranger frowned at them, his gaze skimming suspiciously over the ruins of their impromptu picnic to Steve's way-too-awesome physique before ending on her pink wig, which had been knocked askew while she slept. She reached up and straightened it, casually patting the ends to make sure none of the hair pinned up underneath had escaped.

She took a deep breath then, and moved over to stand next to Steve. She tucked herself into the side of his body, and Steve's hand came up to wrap around her waist like they were any normal, happy couple out for a day of sightseeing.

"We just got married," she said then, the words slipping out before her brain had a chance to take control and rein them back in.

She could feel Steve's fingers shift restlessly on her hip, digging into the hem of her jeans. "Yes," he said after only a short pause, and to his credit he sounded way more natural than she did. "We're newlyweds." He cleared his throat. He didn't look down at her.

The man pushed back the brim of his hat and gave them the Indiana Jones once-over. She dug her hand into the back of Steve's shirt to hide the lack of a wedding ring on her finger.

"Vegas?" the ranger asked.

"We couldn't wait," Steve said, a little bit bashful and a little bit boasting.

"Don't blame you, with your lovely wife."

"Forget me, have you seen this man?" she said, and bumped Steve with her hip. "I couldn't let him get away."

"You're a doll," Steve said fondly, looking down at her for the first time, and suddenly Darcy couldn't feel anything except how _fake_ this conversation was, talking about something that they both hoped would disappear with a minimal amount of fuss and effort. She dropped her gaze. An ant was crawling on their picnic blanket near her shoe, weaving drunkenly along the folds and creases of the fabric.

"We're on our honeymoon," she said, and her voice caught embarrassingly on the last syllable.

"I remember my honeymoon," the man said, eyeing them with a lot more sympathy and kindness now, which meant that at least one small part of her life was working out the way it was supposed to. She'd apparently stunned Steve into silence with the whole honeymoon suggestion, since he was now just standing at attention next to her with a plastic-y Ken smile plastered on his face.

"I'll just leave you two lovebirds to finish packing up," the ranger said, and gave Steve a totally obvious wink and a significant glance in the general direction of her boobs.

"Thank you, sir," Steve roused himself to say, his fingers still digging into her waist.

"Thanks," she said.

"Congratulations to you both," the park ranger said, and dragged a finger along the brim of his hat as he turned away.

They were silent as his pickup truck puttered away down the dirt road. They stayed standing together, frozen like they were posing for some cheap, cheesy portrait of young love, with the Grand Canyon at their backs and little half-empty boxes of food at their feet. She felt hot and uncomfortable under the sticky, midday sun. 

"Um," she said faintly. "So that was weird."

"The weirdest," he agreed, echoing her from earlier. She looked up at him, and he cracked a lopsided smile down at her. 

"Sorry," she said. "It just sort of... came out of my mouth. Which, that explanation _also_ sounds totally weird. I don't know. Apparently I'm losing the ability to say things like a normal human being. And not say the things that I shouldn't."

Steve was quiet for a minute. "You kept him from looking too closely at us. That's a good thing."

"Sure," she said, and shook her head.

Steve was silent as he helped her gather up the leftovers and shake the dirt off the sheet, mirroring her movements as they folded the edges together. There was a stiff formality in the way he held himself that hadn't been there for a while, and she kicked herself for making this whole awkward situation rear back up again. Because joking about something in private was totally different than informing a stranger that you were on your _honeymoon_ and play-acting like what you'd done was real.

"Hey." She put a hand on his elbow. "I really am sorry. I don't know why I said that."

"It's okay," he said.

"So we're cool?"

He cleared his throat before answering. "We're always cool, Darcy Lewis."

"I like it, with the slang," she said, trying to lighten the mood again. "Get down with your bad self, Cap."

"Yo," Steve said, and then stopped, obviously searching for more current day slang to throw her way. "Homie," he added, finally.

"I do declare, you're sounding more and more like that Stark boy every day," she said in a faux-Southern accent, fanning herself with her bare hand. "The next thing you know, it'll be cigarettes and pool. _Oh_. Hey. Do you play pool?"

"Yes, I can play pool," he said, in a flatly matter-of-fact tone that she was beginning to recognize was the Steve version of a smug voice.

"...And you're incredibly good at it. Of course you are. I bet you don't even hustle people on it, you paragon-of-a-man you."

"Want to play a game and find out?" he asked, raising an eyebrow.

"Are you hustling _me_?"

"I don't think there's an appropriate answer to that question."

"Are we going to make a bet?"

"I'm sure we can think of something," Steve said, and to his credit it only sounded a little bit tentative.

"You're on," she said fast, before he could back out of it. "We have to stop somewhere for dinner anyway. You're going down, Steve Rogers. Down to Chinatown."

"Okay," he said, almost smiling again, one hand on the handlebar of his motorcycle. "But we'll see about that."

"Oh, we will. _We will_."


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Continuing kudos to my ever-patient beta [51stcenturyfox](http://51stcenturyfox.livejournal.com/) for picking this up again after way too long.

The bar was a dumpy, squat building by the side of the road, surrounded on either side by miles of tumbleweeds, with three battered pickups parked on the dirt lot out front huddling around the structure like moths in front of a flame. A neon arrow pointed at the bar like an exclamation mark. Tin signs for beer brands plastered to the peeling brown walls gave the whole affair a cheerful air of neglect.

She took off the motorcycle helmet and set to work re-pinning her wig. Next to her, Steve was buttoning and unbuttoning the top of his plaid shirt absently, staring at the building in front of them.

"Okay, so disguises are a go. Sunglasses on, jacket off, and," she pursed her lips, eyeing him thoughtfully, "you might want to mess up the hair a bit so it's not quite so all-American. Oh, and top button undone. Definitely undone."

He raked his fingers back through his hair and shook his head like a dog, bangs falling messily into his eyes like a 90s teenage heartthrob. She pulled the white rhinestone sunglasses out of the front pocket of his plaid, unfolded them, and stuck them on his face with no little satisfaction.

"I should go in first," he said. "If somebody recognizes me, we can leave before you come in as well."

"A man with a plan. I dig it."

He smiled. "Can I get you something to drink?"

"Whatever's on tap would be awesome. Thanks."

He tossed off a little two-finger salute in her direction. "Yes ma'am."

Steve disappeared through the dingy metal door, dull steel showing through the red paint where the edges were chipped and dented. She dug her phone out to kill the time and flipped the view of the camera around to spot-check her re-pinning job. She scrolled through a few text messages from Jane, faithfully trying to cheer her up after landing back in New York, and an email from Pepper by way of JARVIS with the usual no-real-progress-but-things-are-progressing update.

She shoved her phone back in her purse, feeling uneasy and faintly guilty. She shook it off.

The inside of the bar was sunk into a perpetual dusk. Contact paper blacked out the windows, curling a bleached-out white at the edges, and dim incandescent bulbs lit the fixtures hanging over the bar. The ashy smell of cigarettes was sunk into the bones of the building, permeating the stuffed plastic seating and settling into the pores of the thick wood paneling.

Steve waved her over to a little high-top circular table in the back, away from the regulars who were clustered at the far end of the bar, shoulders hunched high around their ears. Darcy was willing to take a wild guess and say that everybody was in their regular, well-worn spots. She threw her purse on the table and jumped up onto the scratched-up wooden bar stool.

"Man, it's, like, Cheers in here, if Cheers was super depressing and also made you feel like some hardcore Deliverance shit was about to go down."

Steve raised an eyebrow.

"Uh. Right. Cliff Notes version: Cheers is this famous television sitcom about a bar, and Deliverance was a movie from the 70s that was mostly about how you're probably going to get raped by hillbillies and stuck like a pig if you get lost in the woods in the deep South."

"That sounds... terrible."

"It is. It's really famous. I don't know. Cheers was great, though. Shouldn't SHIELD be teaching you this kind of thing, anyway?"

"I don't think SHIELD cares if I understand that kind of thing."

She took a cautious sip of the beer Steve had pushed over to her. "They probably consider it part of your charm."

"My charm?"

"Yeah," she said. "Your charm. Dashing young superhero, still has that old-fashioned thing going on that makes the ladies swoon. Seems like a PR win to me."

Steve pursed his lips together. "I... don't think they think of me that way."

"Really?"

"Yes."

She shrugged. "Their loss."

He smiled and took a sip of his own beer. "Hey," she said, noticing the thing happening in front of her for the first time, "you're drinking beer." Score one for Darcy, master of all she surveyed.

Steve leaned a little closer to her, glancing this way and that. The white rhinestone sunglasses were pushed rakishly back on his head. " _Undercover_ ," he whispered conspiratorially.

She rolled her eyes. "You're such a dork."

They ordered hamburgers from the sparse kitchen menu. The burgers arrived greasy and pink, with a slab of American cheese melted on top, slapped down over a haphazard mountain of shoestring fries visibly studded with salt.

"Cheers," she said, and held up her pint glass toward him.

He clinked the rim of his glass against hers. "Cheers. TV sitcom."

"Right on."

Steve devoured his own burger and fries in record time, and spent a few minutes to weasel his way into eating her fries as well until she finally smacked his hand away and crankily told him to just order a second burger, damn it. She was working her way through the picked-over remnants of her fries by the time Steve's second order arrived. He downed it before Darcy even registered the massacre. She finally called uncle on her own fries and pushed the red plastic basket away from her.

Steve nodded in the direction of the basket inquisitively. "Are you going to...?"

"Jesus, dude. Way to decimate the state's french fry population. No, knock yourself out." The life of a metabolically souped-up superhero paid unexpected dividends.

He grinned cheerfully at her and went to town.

\---

The back room of the bar was even dimmer than the front, lit by a row of green-tinged stained glass lamps hung low over the pool table and a few video game consoles flashing and beeping gently to themselves against the far wall.

"Oh my God," she said, catching sight of the pinball machine at the end of the row and blowing straight past the pool tables. "Steve, check that out."

A cartoon semblance of Steve's jawline loomed down at them from the top of the pinball machine as Captain America's visage stared nobly off into the distance. A pair of old WWII dogfighters crossed paths behind him. The electronic board was trimmed in red and blue stars, and a smaller, pocket-sized Steve was standing in the lower corner, smiling broadly at where the player would stand and giving a cheeky little salute.

Steve peered down into the play field of the pinball machine with curiosity. There were SS symbols on three smaller bumpers and a faded caricature of Hitler's face on the furthest bumper, hidden behind the front row.

"I wonder how old this is," she said, touching it carefully with the tip of one finger, like it was going to crumble into dust.

"I don't know," he said, leaning down to read the fading words painted on the wooden slabs. "After my time."

"You know, I think you're right. It doesn't look nearly retro enough to be you-era. Maybe the 60s? 70s?"

"I have no idea," he said, eyeing the miniature version of himself next to the scoreboard.

"Well. I don't know about you, but I don't think we can pass up giving this baby a spin. Hold on, I'll grab us some quarters." She fed a five dollar bill into the squat change machine sitting guard at the front of the row of the video games, scooping up the quarters that spilled out with two hands.

They played two games in fast succession. Darcy was passable at pinball, and while Steve was (predictably) a savant at the game, he lost out on a string of unlucky returns.

The high score flashed at them after each loss, some joker with the initials ASS. "That dude sucks," Darcy grumbled, poking a finger at the electronic numerals. "It's cosmically wrong that you can't get the high score on a Captain America game."

Steve shrugged, looking a little bit embarrassed. "Not really."

"So do you ever get used to being, like, a pinball game anyway? Or any of this stuff?"

"Like the trading cards?" he asked absently. He tracked the progress of his ball into a side chamber of rubber bands with a little label that said Occupied France.

"Yeah. Or stuff. I mean, you're basically a piece of pop culture. Stand up comedians make jokes about you. You were a character on the Simpsons. I'm pretty sure my dad collected your comic books when he was a kid. That's gotta be a little weird."

A sharp shot back killed his final ball, and he straightened up from crouching over the table as mechanical Hitler-laugher floated out of the tiny speakers. "...A little?" he agreed, sounding unsure.

She elbowed him out of the way and fed the machine their last quarters. "It'd wig me out, that's all I know." She pulled the plunger back and let it slam forward with a satisfying _thwack_ , launching the first ball into the upper half of the field, almost hitting the Hitler bumper on the back of the head. "Almost got 'em," she muttered and flipped the ball right back up into the stratosphere.

"It's not me, though," he said, frowning. "All of that, _this_ , it's not me. It's Captain America."

"Captain America _this_ ," she muttered, and slammed her open palm into the side of the machine. The ball jerked sideways on the polished wood at the impact. She clipped it with murderous intent into a segmented section with divots that appeared to be Poland.

"Nobody makes Steve Rogers trading cards. I'm Captain America, but... that - whatever Captain America is - that isn't only me."

Darcy leaned back from the table, one ball left. "Tony Stark is Iron Man," she said, reasonably. "I think there's a whole line of lunch boxes with that exact phrase printed on them. And Thor is, like, basically always Thor. I'm pretty sure he could not _not_ be Thor, even if he tried really hard. Even when I first met him and he was as a normal human, he was still pulling a bunch of Thor-like shit."

"I'm a soldier," Steve said slowly. "I've always served something greater than myself."

She popped the last ball into play and bit her lip as it fell straight through the field, avoiding any of the obstacles around it like magic. She batted it up a few times, coming close to Hitler once or twice, before finally losing it on a nasty rebound. She straightened up. Steve was watching her closely.

He licked his lips. "Your dad collected Captain America comic books?"

"That's what he tells me." The room was quiet now with the pinball machine lying still under her fingertips. "Which is actually really weird, now that I think about it. I am never telling my parents about this, dude. No offense. The whole rumored-to-be-dating-you thing was an awkward enough conversation to have."

"None taken," Steve said, oh-so-politely.

He didn't say anything else after that - he just _stared_ at her. The wood of the pinball machine was warm and smooth, polished slick with age and decades of hands sliding over the surface. Distant warning bells were starting to go off in some far reach of Darcy's mind, muffled klaxon peals of _this is not a good idea_ and _seriously, Darce, not a good idea, what are you doing?_ Nothing made ex-marriages more awkward than jumping your intended ex-husband in the back of some rundown bar in the middle of Bumfuck, Nevada.

She cleared her throat. "What do you..."

Steve started to talk fast at the same time. "...Who was I in the Simpsons?"

"What?"

He shook his head, visibly swallowing. "The Simpsons is an animated show, right? A cartoon? I think I've seen it."

"Yes. Yeah. It's a cartoon. You were... they had a character named Captain Springfield. He had a, uh, a doughnut on his shield instead of the..." Her hand drifted behind her back as she waved in in a circular motion at the shield there, and she only realized a split second too late that drawing attention to the fact that he'd pretty much branded her the night they'd ended up _married_ was probably the least effective way to diffuse sexual tension, like, ever.

"...instead of the star," she finished weakly, and dropped her hand back at her side. He nodded, like that explanation made absolute sense to somebody from the 1940s.

Darcy was starting to buzz now with a _terrible_ idea, she could feel it, could feel what a bad idea it was, but she really couldn't remember why she should care.

"Hey, Steve," she said, shifting one step closer to the pinball machine, sliding her hand along the edge of the casing. The back room of the bar was deserted except for the two of them, lit by the underwater-green lamps over the billiard table.

"Yeah?"

"I think..." She licked her lips, and tried again. "So you remember more of the... the night we got married than I do."

"I think so," he agreed, a little cautiously.

"Maybe we could, you know. Make that more even." A drumbeat of _bad idea_ , _bad idea_ , _bad idea_ pounded in her veins, making her feel heady and a little reckless. She was young, she was unemployed, she was accidentally married to a great guy she really, really wanted to mash her face up against. This was okay, wasn't it? 

She reached a hand out to hook a finger through a loop of his khaki pants and pulled, tugging him forward at the hip. He stumbled a step closer to the pinball machine. She knew there was no way she could have done that if Steve had wanted to resist.

"What are you doing?"

"Noooothing," she said coyly, and started to climb her fingers up the buttons of his shirt.

Steve's gaze flickered down to watch her hand for a second, tiptoeing up his torso, and then went back to her eyes.

"Fine," she said. "You've stumbled onto my evil master plan. Do you want to make out or not?"

"Make out?" Steve's voice was strangled. She could feel him breathing, the quick rise and fall of his torso underneath her fingertips.

"Yeah."

" _Here_?"

"Yeah. I mean, like, I've been thinking - I'm hot, and you're hot, yeah? And I _am_ sort of your wife right now, but we shouldn't let that stop us. And I've wanted to kiss you all day, so -"

He cut her off mid-sentence, leaning down to press his lips up against her hard. It was graceless, a little like being punched in the mouth by Steve's teeth, but his hands settled around her waist a second later and things took a swift turn for the better.

She had thought this might feel familiar, his lips pressed up against her own and their noses bumping as they figured out how to fit their faces together, but this felt... new. Steve tasted like salty grease and the bitter tang of beer, reassuringly substantial and real. She curled her fingers into the gap between the buttons of his shirt.

She ran her tongue along his bottom lip, biting at it. He groaned a little and opened his mouth to her for the first time, shuffling his feet a tiny step closer as he did. She put a hand to his jaw to pull him down to her a little more - he was awkwardly tall in the kissing department, looming up over her, which was both unexpectedly frustrating and really, incredibly hot.

Steve slid a hand behind her neck. His fingers threaded through the pinned-up hair underneath her pink wig. She moved in another couple inches closer to him, bringing her hips around the corner of the pinball table. 

Because oh God, Steve could _kiss_. The man could actually, legitimately kiss. Darcy was starting to have a lot more sympathy for the woman she'd been the night she'd Vegas-married Steve, strung out on hormones and chemicals and the way Steve kissed her, rough and without a terrible amount of finesse but with _something_ she instinctively responded to - desperation or single-mindedness or sheer, basic chemistry. She remembered the photo she'd seen, the two of them kissing in some back alley. She remembered how she'd been standing on her toes then, the length of her body pressed up against his.

She went up on the balls of her feet to deepen the kiss, and then threw both her arms up over his shoulders. She felt like she was trying to claw her way up a tree.

She tore her mouth away, panting. "Oh my God, why are you so _tall_?"

"Science," he said, gasping out the word fast and distracted, 100% serious. He sucked her lower lip back into his mouth.

He was slouched down to kiss her. His hand slipped around her body, circumnavigating her waist until the palm of his hand ended up spread flat and wide against the small of her back. Her pulse was pounding heavily in her ears: the thump of it traveled the length of her body, skittering along the nerves of her skin, pooling somewhere deep in her stomach.

And whoa buddy, she was starting to register just what an epically bad and simultaneously awesome idea this was. He was pressing his palm against the shield drawn on her back like a lifeline. She felt hazy and increasingly frantic and this man was her _husband_ , at this very moment, with his tongue in her mouth. Her _husband_. She felt that fact viscerally for the first time.

She worked an arm around his torso to get at his tucked-in shirt, yanking blindly until it came loose. She slipped her hand across the taut muscles of his bared skin until the tips of her fingers settled into the groove of his spine. She traced the signature she knew was there with her index finger.

He made this soft noise at that and stumbled into her. She braced herself for the impact, but instead she felt his arm at her waist slip down under her ass. He bent at his knees and the next thing she knew he was lifting her up, his forearm hooked underneath her body. It was pretty damn smooth, and _oh God_ she was definitely into this situation in a really fundamental and surreal way.

He didn't appear to be straining to hold her up (so yeah, she knew the dude was strong, but it was really only dawning on her what that meant). She wrapped her legs around his hips anyway and leaned harder into the kiss.

Steve walked them backwards slowly until her ass hit the top of the pinball machine. Her legs were still hooked around his waist. He muttered something she couldn't quite understand into her mouth.

"Steve," she said, and pushed a little at his shoulder. Her voice sounded distant and thick, even to herself.

"Darcy," he mumbled, and tilted his head to get at the underside of her jaw.

"I..." He worked his way back up to kiss her properly again, and her ability to form coherent language bled away. "I," she gasped, trying again a minute later, "...There was a photo. Of us. After we were married."

"What?" He stilled, his breath hot against her cheek. She could feel fingertips flexing restlessly at her hips.

"There's a photo."

"How do....?"

She dug a knuckle into the base of his spine, and he shifted into the pressure, closing his eyes as his mouth dropped open. It was weirdly pornographic, even in the middle of everything else. "I saw it online somewhere. We had wedding rings. In the picture, I mean - we were already wearing the rings."

He opened his eyes again and drew back from her, looking suddenly cautious. Darcy tightened her grip on his waist.

"It was a nice photo," she added softly. "You were kissing me. It looked nice."

He pressed his forehead back up against hers and took a deep breath, and Darcy could feel herself getting distracted by his _eyelashes_ of all things. They were inhumanely pretty. "I don't remember that."

"Me either. But." She squirmed a little, because oh man, this was _embarrassing_. She didn't know why she was even trying to go down this path - this was all going to end badly. So very badly. She screwed up her courage, stuck it to the wall, and made herself say it. "Maybe we could pretend."

"What?"

She felt light headed. "Pretend. Pretend we're actually married. Like with the ranger. Because... because it was nice."

Steve stopped breathing for a second at that.

"I mean, I know we can't, not really... but. You could be my husband. And I could be your wife. Just for a little bit. Until we get back."

Steve swallowed hard. "Until we get back to the hotel?" he asked, and his voice was a tight whisper.

"Sure. Yes." She leaned up again to kiss him, trying to keep it gentle and sweet, trying to let him know that she wasn't messing with him.

He kissed her back, tentatively at first, almost chaste. Then his hand slid back around her waist, large and steady, and he pushed back into her body and deepened the kiss, and wham, it was like they were back to the races almost immediately. Except there was something else there now, something heady and _dangerous_. She knew they shouldn't be doing this. This was so unfair to Steve.

"Okay," he gasped in agreement, and put a hand behind her neck. "We're married. You're my wife." He kissed her rough and desperately and she had a brief, glancing thought about how lonely this man was, day in and day out.

She grabbed at his ears to angle his head a little better.

Things escalated fast from there, his hand roaming with increasing confidence up under her shirt. Darcy was starting to dimly realize that they were pretty close to flat-out doing it in the back room of some shitty bar, in public, damn the presses. She couldn't bring herself to care. Steve's tongue was in her mouth and the tips of his fingers were brushing the underside of her breasts and her legs were wrapped around his hips. The blood in her veins was _rushing_. 

...Somebody coughed behind them.

Steve froze in the middle of kissing her. He was breathing fast, muscles tense, like he was ready for a fight. Darcy felt dizzy and unsteady.

Steve slowly disengaged from her, then caught her eye and kissed her gently one more time before ducking his head down. He twisted at the waist to look for the source of the voice behind them. He kept his hips facing the pinball machine and she realized with an almost embarrassingly intense thrill how obvious it was that he was dealing with a pretty epic boner situation.

"You can't do that here," the voice said. It was the younger of the two bartenders from the front, a punk kid with silver earring studs shaped like little cartoon rockets and a thick plaid lumberjack shirt. He sounded bored. "Go get a hotel room or something. People having sex on the pinball table is not cool."

And Je-sus. Nothing put a damper on making out with your pretend husband in some dive bar like being called out on it by an impartial bartender with disaffected youth culture practically stamped on his forehead.

Steve's jaw tightened and he threw his shoulders back, morphing into full-on patriotic Captain America mode. The bartender's eyes flickered between Steve and the comically masculine visage looming down at them from the scoreboard of the pinball game. The cold fear that prickled over Darcy's body effectively killed the last of the make out mojo she'd had going on. This kid was like weapons-grade anti-Viagra.

"Sorry about that," Darcy said casually, and walked her fingers up to the sunglasses that were still pushed back on Steve's head. She lowered them, fussing with them like she was any girl tucking her (fake, totally fake) husband back into a presentable state. She gave Steve's cheek a brisk pat.

"Sorry," Steve echoed, his voice tight and weird.

She smiled in a way she hoped hit the mark somewhere between self-deprecating and loopy in love with the man in front of her. "You know how it is. Newlyweds."

The guy rolled his eyes. "Whatever."

"We'll go," Steve said.

"Do that," the bartender said pointedly, and turned to leave.

They both stayed where they were for a minute, silently - Steve breathing hard and pressing his erection into the side of the pinball table while she clumsily tried to re-pin her hair for what felt like the ten millionth time that day. Her hands were shaking.

After a little bit, Steve's breathing started to sound a little less strained, a little less like he was visibly fighting for control. She smiled at him wanly and was relieved when he gave her a small smile back.

"Shall we, Mrs. Rogers?" he asked. It was only from being this close up that she could see the strain around his eyes from fighting to sound casual.

She carefully reached for his hand and fit their palms together, lacing her fingers through his. "Yeah," she said. "Let's go."

He nodded.

She jumped down off the pinball table, tugging her shirt back into place with the hand not holding Steve's, and cleared her throat. "So. I, uh, can't believe I never thought about the fact before now that your name is Mr. Rogers."

He blinked. "What else would it be?"

"Nothing. It's just funny, that's all."

Steve was frowning the severe frown of a man who'd been frozen in ice for the last seventy five years.

"...Mister Rogers' Neighborhood?" Darcy took a deep breath, and made herself keep talking. "Man, I can't believe nobody's clued you in on that one yet. SHIELD is just failing you left and right on this stuff. It was this kids show with an amazingly sweet man who wore cardigans. It's, like, iconic. You'd probably like it - it's mind-bogglingly wholesome. Very Captain America, plus more puppets and minus the whole fighting the Nazis thing." She knew she was babbling.

"Tony calls me that sometimes," he said slowly. He was still holding her hand as they walked through the front of the bar. The bartender give them a sharp look from behind the counter which Darcy pointedly ignored. "I thought he just found the formality hilarious."

"I think I'd prefer Mrs. Rogers-Lewis, though," she said, trying for a teasing tone. "It just seems right. Maybe Lewis-Rogers."

"Is hyphenating something people do now? I hear that, sometimes."

"Sometimes," she said. "Sometimes the guy takes a hyphenated last name as well - it depends."

"So that would make me Steve Rogers-Lewis, then," he tried out, mulling over the syllables like he was tasting them.

"Ugh," she said. "You know what, I take it back - let's not."

"What's wrong with it?"

"The three first names in a row is kind of terrible. It's like every douchey early morning DJ, ever."

Steve shrugged. "I like it," he said simply, and that shut her up fast, heart pounding again.

He shifted his fingers around hers as he pushed the thick metal door to the outside world open, his hand large and dry wrapped around her own. Did his hands never get sweaty? Was the whole warm-but-dry-palms thing part and parcel of the entire Captain America upgrade?

The air outside was the bar was rapidly cooling with the sunset. The sky above them was tinged with black and shades of pink. There was a hint of stars beginning to come out, and the air tasted sweet and fresh after the stale interior of the bar. Darcy thought that it was one of those evenings that made you feel glad to be alive, the kind of night that made you grateful to have oxygen in your lungs and an entire, massively constructed world underneath your feet.

Steve tossed the motorcycle helmet back to her without a word.

"Hey," she said, and put a hand on his forearm. "Hey, Steve, hold on a minute." He looked down at her. She went up on her toes and kissed his cheek, gently.

"Thank you," she said softly. "Thank you for everything."

He twisted a little bit of her pink hair around his finger. "It was nice," he said finally. "It's been a nice day."

“Even though we didn’t play pool?”

"Yeah. Even then." He smiled at her, and she thought the smile was a little sad. "Come on, Mrs. America. Let's get you back before the motorcycle changes back into a pumpkin."

"Eeew," she said. "Never call me Mrs. America again. That's terrible. It makes me feel like I'm three hundred years old and Miss America's dumpy older sister."

Steve snorted softly. "Never again," he agreed easily, but the joke died on his lips. His gaze dropped away from hers almost immediately.

She couldn't think of a single thing to say after that.

It was a long ride back to Vegas.

\---

Darcy threw herself face-down on the bed in her room and muffled the quietest scream she could manage into the covers. She stayed that way for a while, face smashed up against the blanket, trying to calm the roiling feeling in her stomach and her pulse, tripping madly through her veins.

She was finally getting her breathing under control when her phone beeped. She'd only turned it on again a few minutes ago, when she'd been walking back from the parking garage where she and Steve had shaken hands in their now traditional and increasingly more awkward goodbye. She'd skipped the elevator back to her room and dragged her feet up countless flights of stairs instead, working herself up into a pretty nice state about how inconsiderate Vegas was to build such indecently tall hotels.

It was something to think about.

She felt around blindly for her phone on the bedspread next to her and dragged it up close to her nose, squinting like a grumpy mole at the small text.

It was an email from Pepper saying the marriage had been successfully dissolved, like it never even existed, and that it looked like they were free and clear and scott-clean and everything was perky and wonderful and the best possible outcome for the situation, oh joy.

"Fuck my life," Darcy said with feeling, and mashed her face back into the mattress.


	6. Chapter 6

Darcy couldn't sleep.

She turned on the TV in her hotel room and caught the tail end of TMZ, which spurred her to do a sweep of the gossip rags and check if they'd unearthed any further pictures of her and Steve, but it was the same old same old plastered across the front pages. Nothing from their impromptu road trip today.

She flipped her phone in her hand, tracing a mobius strip along the metal edge absently as the television faded into a late-night rerun of Friends. She clicked the power button of her phone on and off a few times, swiped the screen open, locked it, realized she didn't have Steve's number because… did Steve have a phone? Did she even have the ability to text him? She's never seen Steve use a cell phone, and he'd mentioned a SHIELD _beacon_ of all things, which brought up a lot of a weird, implanted X-Files shit that Darcy would rather not think about.

She sent a _what up_ text to Jane, and stared at the ceiling for a while waiting for a reply that never came.

\---

Darcy didn't remember falling asleep, but she woke up, heart pounding, at the furtive sound of rustling in her room. She patted blindly at her side for her laptop, and raised it like a sledgehammer over her head. She lowered a cautious toe off the bed into the darkness.

Then she spotted, at the bottom of the hotel room door, a flash of something white in the thin light leaking in from the hallway.

She marched over and yanked the door open, and Steve tumbled into the room at her feet.

"Um, hi?" Steve said, and scrambled back up to standing, brushing at his pants. He was wearing the same khakis he'd had on the day before, wrinkled and looking definitely worse for the wear, with a plain white undershirt topping instead of the button-down. His bangs were slicked weirdly to the side, plastered to his forehead. She'd never seen a picture of Steve, pre-Captaining, but she could imagine it suddenly, like a shaky 3D movie, the images layered on top of one another.

She crossed her arms over her chest in a desperate attempt to keep this moment from spiraling into something she couldn't understand or control. "Steven."

"I…" Steve gestured at the ground, then leaned over fast to pick up whatever it was he'd been sliding under her door. Darcy wasn't sure, but she thought it looked like a piece of paper, folded into one of the elaborate origami packets she'd used to pass notes around in middle school. Steve shoved it back in his pocket.

Darcy raised an eyebrow. Steve stuck his chin up and stared at her.

Then his gaze started to drift south, before snapping heroically back up to her face, and Darcy remembered with a sudden flush that she'd been sleeping in a tank top and cotton PJs, sans bra. She subtly repositioned her crossed arms.

"What time is it, anyway?"

"Five. Sorry, I didn't mean to wake you up. I just… I couldn't sleep."

"It's okay. I'm up. Do you, uh, do you want to come in?"

Steve glanced past her shoulder, and his eyes skipped away fast from whatever was behind her. Her _bed_ , she realized suddenly, the one she'd been sleeping in so the covers were all sprawled around and the sheets twisted up from her tossing and turning.

Steve breathed in sharply. "No. No, that's okay. What about…" he faltered.

"What about what?"

"…the roof?" 

"Huh?"

He dug his hands into his pockets, hunching up his shoulders. "The roof."

"What about it?"

"We could talk there."

"Wait, is that a thing? Are we allowed to? Isn't that, like, Vegas penthouse type shit up there?"

Steve blinked. "I don't know."

He seemed so dumbstruck by her question that she took pity on the guy, who was obviously having some very un-Captain America feelings right now about being in the same room with her when a bed was involved. "Well, okay. I suppose we can check it out. Give me a minute, though? I just woke up." She inclined her head toward the open bathroom door, and Steve leaned his shoulder against the doorframe, not letting a toe go over the line of her room, because obviously that was going to be the green light where they just couldn't help themselves and got all up in it.

She locked herself in and leaned her head against the counter for a five count, before pulling it together enough to pee, splash water on her face, and (optimistically) give her teeth a quick brush. She ran a hand absently across her lower back, thumb over the dip in her spine, before heading back out.

She snagged her wool coat, the one with the buttons that screamed big city and hadn't been useful at all in the middle of a desert, and threw it on over her tank top. "Lead on, Cap."

They took the elevator in silence to the highest level they could reach without a penthouse key, and tromped up the stairs for the last few floors. Steve took the stairs two at a time, like he was walking downhill. Darcy tried to hide how much she was panting and shrugged the jacket back off, nipples be damned. They were both just going to have to deal with the fact that she looked like a car with some really in-your-face headlights, because fuck all if she was going to sweat all over her nice coat to save them a little embarrassment at this stage. Nipples were a splash in the bucket in the ocean of embarrassing things the two of them had had to deal with this week.

The utilitarian metal door at the top of the stairwell was definitely not in the Vegas penthouse category. A bright EXIT sign hummed to itself over the doorway, and a few ominous-looking red wires ran down the length of the frame. Darcy stopped, stymied by the aura of Serious Consequences the entire setup exuded.

Steve stepped a little closer to the door and ran a hand thoughtfully down the wiring. He looked up at where the red wires hooked into with the sign above their heads and the push bar across the center of the door.

"I think," Steve said, "…we should be okay," and pushed the door open.

Darcy cringed, waiting for the inevitable screech of shoplifting security alarms. Nothing happened, though, except for Steve continuing to hold the door open for her, arm extended like her high school prom date. On steroids. With extra booster shots of patriotism and nice looking blonde hair. So, really, nothing like her prom date at all.

The roof was concrete, blocks of it littering the top of the building, interspersed with vents and short ladders and gauges. Darcy headed for the edge of the roof; there was a thick ridge of concrete circling the building. Steve's balcony, with the thin metal railing and the feeling of being suspended over an entire city was much nicer than this, but Darcy made the most of it and leaned over a bit to catch a view of the ground. It was very far away, the lights of the strip forming a thick sort of blurred Milky Way, entire constellations of neon under their feet.

Steve came up to stand beside her, his features shadowed in the dawning light.

"So," said Darcy. Might as well rip the bandaid off. "I suppose that's that, huh."

Steve nodded, a bit too stiff, a bit too Captain America. "Pepper called me this morning." So he _did_ have a phone.

"She sent me an email last night."

"I'm not so good at the email stuff. I mostly ignore it. Drives Tony crazy."

"You rebel," she said fondly, forgetting for a moment that this was supposed to be the awkward part. This was supposed to be the part where she had to face the facts that this whole crazy thing was done and soon-to-be forgotten, when less than twelve hours earlier she'd had her tongue down this man's throat and had been pretty close to getting a hand down his pants. Why _hadn't_ she managed to get a hand down his pants? Missed opportunities, everywhere she looked.

Steve snorted, and it sounded both self-deprecating and a little angry. "Something like that."

"So you got the personal service call from Pepper, then?"

"Yeah."

"Just out of curiosity, what'd she say?"

"That everything worked out as well as it could." He said it flatly, like he was reciting a fact.

She didn't trust herself to say anything to that, so she nodded.

Steve took a deep breath. "I… that's not what I wanted to tell you, though. I got a second call this morning. There's a… um. A situation. I have to go." A pause. "They're sending a plane," he added, like that was the kicker that made this whole dumb situation real.

Darcy pressed her tongue up against the roof of her mouth. "So that's what was up with the whole middle school note passing thing? You had to split and wanted to leave a _thanks for the marriage, it was short but sweet_ letter for me to remember you by?"

Steve hesitated, then dug his hand back into his pocket. "Kind of."

He handed her the folded up bit of paper. It was more like a envelope than the little paper footballs she was used to. There was a hard bump in the middle of the packet, and the word DARCY was printed in neat block caps on the outer edge.

She opened it, untucking the folded tabs and corners that made up the makeshift envelope, until she came to the center pocket of the paper and the whole thing unfolded flat in her hand. There was something in the middle of her palm now, something metal and shiny, like brass. It took her a weird minute in the dim pre-dawn light to realize that it was a ring - _the_ ring, with the neatly cut diamond and the little gold filigreed rubies on the sides.

"I know you gave it back to me, but I thought… you can keep it. If you want to."

Darcy opened her mouth, realized she couldn't think of a thing to say, and gaped at the man like a fish. _Suuuuper_ hot.

"You can do whatever you want with it," Steve was saying now, a little faster. "You could sell it, whatever. Don't feel like you have to -"

"Okay," she said, cutting him off, and for one weird, surreal moment she almost shoved the thing back on her finger - because that's what you _did_ with rings, that's where you stored them away when you were done thinking about them - and only saved the motion at the last moment by passing the ring off to hold it with her other hand.

"I thought about trying to return it, and I couldn't imagine what I'd say. And then I thought about keeping it, but that felt wrong, and then I thought… well."

"Thanks," she said. "It's… thank you." She coughed, and started to pull her coat back on to cover it.

"Are you okay?"

"Yeah." She sniffed. "It's a little cold up here, that's all."

"Oh." Steve plucked at his sleeve. "I'd offer you my shirt, but I don't think my t-shirt is going to help the situation."

Darcy pulled her coat collar firmly up around her ears. "If you want to take it off that badly, I'm not going to stop you, man."

"Ha," Steve said, and something about the idea of this man ha-ing her was the cherry on top of this comedy of errors. Darcy wasn't sure if she wanted to laugh or cry.

"Just to be clear: that's a no on the stripping? 'Cause really. I'm down with that."

"Ha," he repeated.

"Somebody here obviously missed their true calling as a stand up comedian."

"…You?"

"Ha," she said.

He didn't say anything to that, and she twirled the ring awkwardly between her fingers for the lack of anything better to do. What _was_ she going to do with the thing?

"What if I keep this in my purse as a weapon?" she said finally. "You know, like the lady version of brass knuckles. If I ever get in any trouble, I'll just slip this baby on, punch the person in the mouth, and think of you."

"Okay."

"I can even yell _AMERICA_ when I do it."

"That would be a nice touch."

She rubbed her finger absently over the band of the ring, the metal polished and warm. She noticed that Steve was watching her, watching her hands. She felt a sudden surge of guilt. She remembered saying that she could be his wife last night. She remembered how he kissed her, after that.

Darcy slipped the ring into the pocket of her coat.

The sun was starting to slip up over the horizon in front of them, dimming the neon and brushing the tops of the tallest buildings with golden light. Steve was leaning on his elbows now, looking down at the city below.

"Hey, do you have a pen?"

Steve patted his pockets, frowned, and fished one out. It was a slim fancy-looking silver number, the kind you had to twist. "What for?"

She pulled out the little makeshift paper envelope, folded it in two, and licked her thumb to drag it along the outer crease of the paper. She tore it and scrawled her number on the half without her name. She folded it and handed it back to Steve.

"My phone number."

He snuck a peek then.

"For real, my phone number. You're the only one now I can talk to about this whole weird thing. So you should… not be a stranger, I guess." Fuck, this was not going as smoothly as she had hoped. "If you wanted." He was silent, just staring at the piece of paper with a weird, blank expression. "Jesus. Just say something, dude."

He folded the sheet of paper neatly back up then, and grabbed the torn half-sheet of paper sitting on the concrete in front of them, the one with her name written on it. He added a string of digits underneath it in the same block lettering. He held the slim piece of paper out to her between his fingers in an oddly dainty gesture, like a cigarette.

"Here's my… mine too." Their fingers brushed when she took it from him. "I might not be able to answer my phone for a while, though, because of the…" He hesitated, and his dilemma couldn't have been clearer if a flashing arrow that said CONFIDENTIAL INFORMATION, DO NOT REVEAL had appeared over his head.

"…Top secret superhero business? You could just say it's above my pay grade, you know, although since I'm technically unemployed right now I suppose that's kind of a redundant statement." She rubbed the edge of the paper he'd given her between the pads of her fingers. His writing looked like an engineer's, cramped text barely winning the battle against readability.

"This isn't, like, a pager number, right? Or JARVIS or Tony Stark's secret bathroom emergency phone? Do you even have a cell phone?"

Steve huffed a laugh. "It's my phone."

"Okay. So can I text you? You aren't on some kind of weird old school cell plan, are you?"

"I think SHIELD will let me text," Steve said, a grin starting to grow on his face.

"Oh man, if your phone is SHIELD issue, please tell me some bored intern programmed, like, America Fuck Yeah as your ringtone. I'd probably die laughing."

"Since I want you to stay alive, I'm going to go with a no on that." His face looked so open like this, laugh lines around his eyes and a dopey grin on his face, the smile curled like a fishhook into the side of his mouth. She reached up a hand without thinking about it, brushing back the blond hair falling in clumps into his eyes.

He went very still.

"I made Jane change her ringtone for Thor to Thunderstruck." Her hand was still touching the side of his face. Why was she still touching him? What was her hand _doing_? "Even though Thor doesn't really do the cell phone thing. Like, at all. But one day he is going to call her on her that phone, and then _bam_ , Thunderstruck. My life's work will be done that day."

"Darcy?"

"Hmm?" Her fingers were carding back through his hair, purely of their own volition. She was taking absolutely no responsibility for what was happening here.

Steve's gaze slid sideways, and he caught the top of her right ear between his fingers and rubbed a little. It was… weird. Not sexy, but not unpleasant either. She shuffled in a half-step closer to him, putting a hand on his ridiculously tiny waist, feeling the ridge of his waistband underneath the plain white undershirt. All she could remember was kissing him yesterday, the two of them going at it in the back of that stupid bar He'd gasped the word _wife_ into her mouth. Her chest felt tight and weird.

Steve ducked his head down closer to hers. "Can I…?"

She breathed out a breath she hadn't realized she'd been holding. "Fuck, yeah."

He didn't move, though, just kept staring somewhere past her, his hand sliding along the edge of her face.

She tilted her face up. "Was that a rain check thing?"

He shook his head.

"Is it weird because we're, like, divorcees or annulment buddies or whatever now? I'm your ex-wife slash sort of one night stand?"

Steve's fingers paused, the tip of his thumb resting on the thin, pale skin behind her ear. She couldn't think of the last time anybody had touched her there. "No," he said, finally.

He leaned down to kiss her, very softly, on the lips. Darcy felt lightheaded, curls of something complicated and nervous filling her chest, like this was the first time they'd ever kissed rather than the last.

His lips were closed, polite, with no tongue, his mouth pressed up against hers. It was like they were reenacting kissing as imagined by two of the world's most repressed teenagers, possibly as presented in an old black and white movie about the dangers of getting it on out at Inspiration Point. She teased his lower lip between her teeth after a few seconds, biting gently at it, and slipped her hand around to his back. She could feel the thick muscles of his back shiver under her fingertips.

He didn't deepen the kiss. His eyes were closed.

He broke the kiss, his finger stroking gently up and behind her ear. Then he took a step back, away from her.

Steve cleared his throat and scrubbed the back of his hand across his lips. Darcy concentrated on staying upright and respectable.

"I have to…" he started, gesturing.

"I know," she interrupted, because there was no way she wanted to hear any further explanations on the subject. "Saving the world, all that stuff. Seriously, I got the memo."

He nodded, took a step closer to the edge of the roof, and for one wild moment Darcy thought Steve was going to pull the Grand Canyon stunt again, just launch himself off the edge of the building and twist midair, waving calmly back up at her as he fell. That was something superheroes did on their way out, right? Dramatic exits and entrances, kicking in doors and standing backlit in silhouette with their fists on their hips as the soundtrack swelled around them?

Instead, Steve squinted into the sunrise. "I'm sorry," he said finally. "For… for everything."

"Don't be sorry," she said.

They shook hands, because Captain America stood for nothing if not tradition, and he left.

\---

She had a commercial flight out of Vegas the night morning, and stumbled sleepily out of the hotel at six in the morning, dragging her ratty purple suitcase with red ribbon attached to the handle, to discover a small group of reporters hanging around outside the front doors, hunkered down with styrofoam cups and the bitter look of people whose livelihood depended on the sudden appearance and generosity of D-list celebs. Somebody gave a shout as she came out, and the whole group scrambled for their microphones and cameras, crowding in around her like the world's most inappropriate press conference, yelling out her name.

She had… kind of forgotten that this part was going to happen.

Darcy pushed her sunglasses up and smiled as confidentially as she could.

"Two minutes," she said, trying to remember all of Pepper's notes. "I have a flight to catch."

 

\---

_Three months later_

\---

"I'm so glad you're here," Kay said, and tapped the thick glass at the bottom of her drink against the wooden table top. "Ugh, I just feel like everything's changing, you know? Everybody's moving to their own little part of the country, and we're never going to all see each other again." She frowned at the ice cubes skating around at the bottom of her glass. "It sucks, man. It's just, adulthood sucks."

"Tell me about it." Darcy took a sip of her beer. "But it also means I get to spend some time out with you in New York, so that, at least, is awesome."

"I'll drink to that," Kay said, and held up the melting, mostly empty remnants of her own drink. Darcy clicked her glass up against Kay's.

Darcy's phone beeped under the table. She snuck a glance by her knee.

_tell me again why I'm stuck in this lab_

Kay chewed the end of her black cocktail straw, the edges of the flattened plastic showing the white of stress lines. "Your boss again?"

"Former boss, present day super-friend," Darcy said, and replied _because you're a big science loving dork?_

"Okay, so this is the woman who dates, like, Thor, right? I don't understand how that is a real thing that happens in our world. Although, I guess the roleplaying might be a bit much, but damn, talk about your fringe benefits, am I right?"

Darcy's fingers paused. "Yeah," she said finally, feeling weird. Jesus, her life was so hard to explain sometimes.

_I hate you_

_all I'm hearing are sweet lies_

Darcy hesitated, then switched her contacts to Rogers, Steve-o.

_hey, weird question, you ever think of the alter-ego stuff as roleplaying?_

Her phone buzzed a couple seconds later. _Not really_

Darcy smiled to herself, and slipped a finger down the cold metal edge of her phone. Dropping the end period was a new and exciting development in the world of Rogers-era texting. Steve fell off the grid for long periods of time with astonishing regularity, making texting etiquette lessons an all or nothing deal.

"I still can't believe you know somebody I studied in my World Mythologies class. I mean, that is crazy."

"I'll tell you what's crazy," Darcy said. "The man's abs. Straight-up bananas. But in, like, a sexy way? Sexy ab-bananas. Ab-nanas."

"I don't think that's a thing."

Darcy tipped back and downed the last of her drink, like a boss. "I calls 'em like I sees 'em."

"Hey. _Hey_." Kay elbowed her enthusiastically in the ribs. "Hot guy, end of the bar. Tell me you don't like the ab-nanas on that one, I dare you."

Darcy turned around, caught of glimpse of Kay's mystery man, and started coughing like it was the 19th century and consumption was going out of style. Because Steve had somehow appeared in the bar, three months after the fact - _Steve Rogers_ , Captain America Steve, former husband and co-conspirator in what she mostly referred to as The-Vegas-Incident Steve. Steve from her texts, from his text _two minutes ago_ , a digital presence on her phone, insubstantial and definitely not physical. _Steve_.

He was scowling down at a tiny Stark-style cell phone in the palm of his hand. It was hard to mistake him for anybody else, even with a baseball cap tugged low over his eyes and wearing a loose cotton jacket in place of his normal leather bomber. He was both bigger and smaller than she remembered. His shoulders were still ridiculous, but she'd started to tell fish tales with them, spreading her hands a little wider each time. 

Fuck. It was actually, really Steve.

He looked over at them then, keyed in by the whole sensing-people-across-a-crowded-room instinct, and she could see his face go blank as he caught sight of her as well. She whipped back around, heart thumping hard up against her ribs. Her hand scrambled wildly at her neck, even though she knew it was bare today. Nothing screamed _crazy stalker_ like wearing your fake Vegas wedding ring as a necklace, because you liked the swirled bits of gold crowding in on the pinpoint rubies and the weird sense of sadness that crept into you when you looked at it.

What the hell was _Steve_ doing here? Maybe this was a dream. A weird fever dream. Maybe her whole life for the past few months had been nothing but a hallucination brought on by too many Saturday morning cartoons and a buried fetish for guys in tights. Darcy pinched the skin at her wrist. Nothing.

"He's coming over here," Kay hissed. She flipped her hair back over her shoulder.

"Um," Darcy heard Steve's voice say, and looked up to him looming up over their small wooden table.

"Helloooo," Kay said, and did this perky little wave. "My name's Kay," she gestured, "and this is Darcy."

Darcy dredged up something she hoped was a smile and nodded weakly. Her face felt disconnected from her brain.

Steve's hand touched the edge of their rickety table, a thumb resting on top of the polished wood and the rest of his large hand curled underneath. "I'm…" He hesitated. "…I'm Steve." _Nailed it in one_ , Darcy thought wildly.

Kay’s eyes flickered over to Darcy for one telling moment, and she tilted her face curiously up at the guy in front of them.

Steve’s face was weirdly impassive. Like they'd never even met, like they hadn't just been talking on their phones. Like they were two strangers in a bar, in a world where they'd never made out like their lives depended on it, got married on stupid and sheer fucking whim, and became nothing to each other again just like that, with the snap of a finger. Like she didn't text him photos and stupid bits of commentary on her life, and Steve didn't send her badly photographed copies of pencil sketches - close ups of elaborate buildings with intricate details, shaded in a mechanical grey, beautiful landscapes devoid of human life, little cartoons drawn in the margins of lined paper, caricatures of people she didn't know and might not even be alive anymore. When did Steve get so smooth, anyway? 

She'd tried calling him, once. He had called her back two weeks later, stumbling over his words with exhaustion. He'd fallen asleep on the phone, snoring gently. She'd laid in bed and listened to him breathe, and woken up the next morning to a dial tone in her ear and an inbox of Captain America news alerts.

Kay kicked the stool on the opposite side of the table away from her and grinned at Steve's giganto silhouette. "Care to join us for a drink?"

Steve's eyes flickered over toward her for the first time. He swallowed as he looked at her, the muscles of his throat working. "Okay." He sat down, perched like a hunched-over gargoyle on the edge of the tiny bar stool. He looked ill-at-ease in his own skin, like his body was too big for the skinny guy he'd been, once upon a very long, very World War II-ish time ago.

"So. _Steve_." Kay leaned in. "What's a guy like you do?"

"I'm an artist."

"Oh yeah? Let me guess. Brooklyn."

A flicker of interest and surprise shocked something like a normal expression out of him for the first time. "How'd you know?"

Darcy fumbled for her voice and finally found it. "Kay just says that to all the guys."

Kay straightened up and stuck her born-and-bred New Yorker nose up in the air. "I do not."

"What'll you have, Steve?" Darcy asked quickly, not sure if she could handle more of the pleasantries. Steve looked over at her, and all the blood rushed to her head. Steve's lips formed words, some sort of attempt at actual communication. Beer. She was going to assume that's what Steve had said, because that's all she had to work with right now. Probably beer. She slipped a hand under the table and rubbed the keys of her phone absently, wondering what had happened to the Steve safely contained in the bloodless text of her phone, the anti-aliased fonts and safe, removed, time-delayed messages.

"I'll just, uh, go get us a round," Darcy said, to cover her inability to function like a human being.

Steve stood up fast when she did, nearly toppling his bar stool. "I'll come with you."

"…Okay?" Darcy agreed.

Kay threw her jacket over Steve's seat and her purse on top of Darcy's stool. "Grab me another vodka gimlet, will you?"

Darcy nodded, and set off through the crowd, slipping sideways through the press of bodies. Steve trailed after her like a particularly large, weaponized tug boat. He was the only thing she was aware of, as she pressed her way through the bar; this mass of a man, living and breathing, actually _here_ , at her back.

They made it around a corner in the bar, landing near the waitress station, strewn with empty glasses and scrunched up napkins. She turned around and bumped her nose up against Steve's chest.

"Sorry," he said, in this tight voice, and took a half-step back from her.

"Steve, seriously, what are you doing -" she started to say, but Steve's eyes flickered down to her lips, and then _she_ started staring at _his_ mouth and oh fuck, what amazing hell was this. She was about to make out with Steve. She was about to get her mouth all over this man in front of a crowded bar full of drunk New Yorkers, one oblivious college friend, and a counter full of half-melted ice and lipstick stains on glass rims. The last time she'd kissed him was a different lifetime, an entirely different _marriage_ ago. It sometimes seemed like a thing that was too crazy to have ever happened, a thing she dreamed, falling asleep in the fifth grade with her head in a textbook.

But this was happening. This was not a drill, this was something that was definitely happening _right now_.

Steve gasped when their lips and teeth hit, his arm going around her back to grip her entire body, and it was the physical shock of that contact that finally made everything real. She threw her arms up around his neck. The top of her head hit the bill of his baseball cap, knocking it backwards. There was this crazy rush of relief, blowing past everything else. They kissed and kissed, and Darcy couldn't remember why they'd ever stopped kissing in the first place.

He brushed the thumb of his hand against her spine. There were no signs of the circular shield there anymore, faded and extinguished over the weeks.

Somebody near them catcalled, breaking out a shrill wolf whistle, and it was just piercing enough to cut through Darcy's awesome-making-out haze. She stepped back from Steve, tearing her mouth away from his. He was breathing hard in front of her, chest heaving.

A couple people near them clapped as they peeled themselves apart, throwing a smattering of drunken applause their way. Some guy in the back yelled "THANK YOU" at them.

"What -"

"Jane," Steve said, out of breath. "It was Jane. She asked me to meet her here."

Darcy glanced wildly around the bar, like Jane might actually be here, like that wasn't the most obvious ploy in the books. "That devious woman."

"I had no idea you were here," Steve said, and started to grin, this wide, dumb, giddy smile.

"Job interview. I didn't know you -"

"A couple days ago."

Her cheeks were starting to hurt from all the grinning.

"Excuse me," one of the waitresses said, and squeezed between them sporting several stacked towers of ominously leaning glasses and a half-apron with a notepad stuck out the side. It was enough to put a step's worth of distance between the two of them.

Steve shifted his weight from one foot to the other. Darcy reached out to bridge the distance between them again, wrapping her fist up in the lapel of his jacket.

"Is this weird?" he asked.

She shook her head, _no_ , then switched directions to _yes_.

"Maybe. The weirdest. But good the weirdest?"

"Yeah," he agreed, breathing the word.

Steve inclined his head in the direction of the table where they'd left Kay, biting her lip as she scowled at her phone. "Who…?"

"Friend from college. And I’m 99% sure she knows who you are. God, Steve. What do we do here?"

Steve shook his head, the motion giddy and helpless and, she thought, a little bit nervous.

Darcy sucked in air through her teeth. "Okay. So, here's what I suggest we do. Number one: We don't get married again. I mean, at least for like, a week or something."

Steve ran a hand up her bare arm, and Darcy's thoughts stuttered and skipped. "Okay," he agreed finally, and Darcy swallowed, hard.

"…Right. Yes. Uh, number two: More with the kissing, because kissing is great, and sometimes all I -"

Steve's mouth was back on hers, just like that. She pushed back hard, shoving his face back with her mouth on his, her tongue tangled up messily with his. He held his ground easily, the strength in his hands almost frightening if it wasn't so tempered.

She wondered what it was like when he lost control.

She broke away from him, gasping. "…can think about is that. Something like that."

"Coming through," somebody shouted, and one of the bartenders pushed his way behind Steve, ducking underneath the wooden counter. Jesus, it was like being in the middle of a shipping lane in Panama.

"And number three," Darcy continued, still staring up at Steve, "you let me buy you a beer."

Steve looked like he was never going to stop smiling. "Only if you let me return the favor."

Darcy pivoted and checked her hip into Steve's, hooking her arm through his so they both faced the bar. "It's a hard sell, but you've got a deal, dude. And just to be clear, sex is still on the table. I mean, I know it's not a part of the numbered plan, but I'm big into improvising, so just gonna put that out there."

"I… okay?" Steve said, looking more than a little flushed.

Darcy juggled the beers and cocktail as they were served up, handing them off to Steve like he was an umbrella rack for a particularly frosty and delicious type of umbrella. They maneuvered their way through the crowd back to Kay, who was texting frantically on her phone, but was nice enough to pretend like everything was normal when Darcy sat the gimlet down in front of her. Steve took the stool back across the table from the two of them.

"Ooh, thanks," Kay said, and stuck her tongue out to track down the tiny cocktail straw sticking out just above the rim of her glass.

Darcy slipped her phone out again under the table. _you think you're so clever_

_I am though. And you thought i wanted to hang out with you FOR you, ha_

_later, lady_ , Darcy typed, and straightened up, flipped her phone to silent, and grinned widely at nobody in particular.

"So. Darcy Rebecca Lewis," Steve said, and leaned toward her. His baseball cap was tugged low, the corner of his mouth turned up. Darcy could think of only one reason that he'd know her middle name, and the thought made her flush hot, warmth seeping up through her spine, until all she could see was Steve in front of her.

"...Tell me about yourself."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *throws hands up in the air!* This story has been like nothing I've ever written before. Thank you to everybody who commented, left kudos, bookmarked, and recced this story - I appreciate ALL of it. And a final thank you to my amazing beta reader, 51stcenturyfox. You're the best.
> 
> If you enjoyed this story and would like to share it, please consider reblogging [this post](http://blithers.tumblr.com/post/65503722957/turn-off-trouble-like-you-turn-off-a-light-66) on tumblr!
> 
> ETA: Also, here is a very tiny (less than 200 words) [prequel scene to this story](http://blithers.tumblr.com/post/64274160855/pov-steve-and-darcy), from Steve's POV, that I wrote for a prompt left on my tumblr.


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